Mary Eliza Jameson


		b. November 2, 1858 

m. September 20, 1883, Orson Ward Hammond 

d. 1918

Mary Eliza Jameson and ``O.W.'' were married in 1883 and they went to Texas. A few years later they were persuaded to migrate to Madison County, Tennessee, where O.W.'s older brother, Charles Hammond, had secured land and was lumbering there to prepare it for farming. Their first child, Jennie Sophronia Hammond thus was born in Madison Co., Tenn., near Lesters Chapel Church. Scotch-Irish and Irish and Hammond-Hale Connecticut Yankee blood had been united in the Mid-South.

Mary Eliza bore three daughters:

Jennie Sophronia (b. Sept. 9, 1887), m. 1907, Ulrich A. Watlington, son of Mack Rob Watlington. See page .
Clara Matilda, b. Jan. 7, 1890) who married James Leven Harton, son of Andrew Jackson Harton
Emma May (b. Dec. 26, 1892) who stayed with the family farm until her death in 1986. See page .

Jameson-Craig-Hammond-Hale, were all pioneers at one time or another and still seeking a homeland in America. Mary Eliza and O.W. decided not to stay with Charles Hammond and his enterprises, but they did settle nearby. At first they lived in the Lester's Chapel community and helped to organize and build a church there in 1889. Then they bought a sixty-six acre farm on Meridian Creek, nearer to Malesus School, and put down roots. The second child, Clara Matilda, was born in 1890 on new farm. In 1892, Emma Mai Hammond was born in the simple log cabin on the new farmland. It was here they grew up and here that Mary Eliza (1918) and Orson Ward Hammond died (1930). They were buried in the Lester's Chapel Cemetery on the Hart's Bridge Road that they had helped establish. On August 26th, 1986, after a full life on the old home place, their daughter, Emma Mai Hammond, was laid to rest beside her parents there.

It is Clara Matilda and James Leven Harton, who in later years followed their son James to California, who kept the traveling Jameson reputation. They moved about 1942 to Los Angeles, where James Lev and Clara M. died and some of their children live yet: but some are still on the move and have doubled back to Wichita, Kansas, and to the homestead on Parkburg Rd. in Madison Co., Tenn.