John Buchanan

Major John Buchanan (January 12, 1759 – November 7, 1832) was an American frontiersman and one of the founders of present-day Nashville, Tennessee. He is best known for defending his fort, Buchanan's Station, from an attack by a combined force of roughly 300 Chickamauga Cherokee, Muscogee Creek, and Shawnee warriors on September 30, 1792. The defenders of the stockade included fifteen gunmen and his wife, Sally Buchanan, who was heavily pregnant with their first child (his second). Origins John Buchanan was the great-grandson of Thomas Buchanan, who left Scotland in 1702 as one of six brothers (John, William, George, Thomas, Samuel, and Alexander) and one sister to resettle in County Donegal, Ireland. John Buchanan and his wife, Jane Trimble, emigrated to America as among the earliest colonists in North America, initially settling in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where John Buchanan was born in 1759. Settlement in Cumberland Twenty-year-old John Buchanan and his family arrived at the future Nashville during the unusually cold winter of 1779–1780, ahead of James Robertson's founding party according to several historians. After losing his brother Alexander at Ft. Nashborough's 1781 "Battle of the Bluff," Buchanan wrote Nashville's first book, John Buchanan's Book of Arithmetic. After living approximately four years at Fort Nashborough, Buchanan and his family moved a few miles east and established Buchanan's Station on Mill Creek, at today's Elm Hill Pike and Massman Drive in Nashville. Around 1786, Buchanan married Margaret Kennedy, who died after giving birth to their first and only child, John Buchanan II, born on May 15, 1787. His second wife, Sarah Ridley, bore thirteen children: George, Alexander, Elizabeth, Samuel, William, Jane T., James B., Moses R., Sarah V., Charles B., Richard G., Henry R., and Nancy M. As G.R. McGee writes in A History of Tennessee from 1663 to 1905, "[i]n the summer of 1780 the Indians began to kill the settlers and hunters that they found alone or in small parties, and this was kept up all the season. There was no open attacks upon the settlements, but if a man went out to gather corn, to hunt, to feed his stock, or to visit a neighbor he was in constant danger of being shot by an Indian hidden away in a thicket or canebrake."