Ralph Whitfield Daniel was the youngest son of William Daniel Sr. and Mary (Polly) Williams who came to the Bear Creek area of Madison County before 1830, probably about 1826, from Rowan County, North Carolina. Being a younger son, he was born near Bear Creek on the family farm there with the Obadiah Butlers and the William H. Johnsons as neighbors. His parents lived, died, and were buried in a neighborhood cemetery used by some Johnsons, Butlers and Daniels which has since been included in a pasture. As of 1974 it was included in the Robert Caldwell farm in this community.
Ralph Daniel was a leather worker and shoemaker by trade, and like most men of his time, he was a farmer as well as a cobbler, since producing the basic necessities of life at home was so important. On Sept. 7, 1871, at age forty-one, he purchased a seventy-one acre farm from Robert Arnold which lay near the Dr. John R. Watlington home and near the relatives of America Anderson. It was probably here that Mack Rob got to know Eula Daniel as she participated in community activities or as he bargained with Rafe Daniel for a new pair of boots.
America Tabitha Anderson, eight years younger than Rafe, was born and reared within a mile of the Big Springs Methodist Church in what is now Chester County. Her maternal ancestors, Joel Chappell, had been an early settler on the land that lay between the Pinson Mounds and the Forked Deer River to the South. His daughter Winifred Finney Chappell married Paulin O'Neal Anderson and they enlarged the family holdings there to several hundred acres. America was the fifth child of Paulin O. and Winifred Chappell Anderson. Both the Chappell and Anderson families were old families of Tidewater Virginia and of strong English heritage.
``Rafe'' Daniel was an humble shoemaker, had some Indian blood, and was considered unworthy of an Anderson daughter but there were daughters to spare at the time. Another daughter, Mary Jane, married Frank Wallace Watlington. Paulin Anderson is quoted as once saying that ``the devil owed him a debt and paid him off in sons-in-law.''
Eula Avenant Daniel lived close enough to both sets of grandparents to
learn from them. She and her nine brothers and sisters must have had
many difficult times growing up in the Reconstruction Period of West
Tennessee. Since she died relatively young
little record of her
childhood and youth has been preserved. About 1878, at seventeen years of
age, she married Mack Rob Watlington who was eight years her senior,
and her first child, Mable, was born in 1879. During the twenty-four years of
her married life she gave live birth to at least ten children, five of
whom lived to adulthood. From her oldest daughter Mable we know that
for several years before her death she was not strong and many kitchen
and household tasks fell upon Mable.
America Tabitha Anderson died in Crockett County, near Bells, in February 1888 or 1889 and was buried in the cemetery of the Cypress Methodist Church between Bells and Gadsden, Tenn. Her son Charlie Daniel's first wife, Betty Lowery was also buried there. Ludie Daniel thought they had moved to Crockett County before the death of her mother, then moved back to the farm at Big Springs. Ulrich Watlington thought America was visiting her children who lived in Crockett County and was taken ill with pneumonia, dying suddenly.
Ralph W. Daniel died at age fifty-nine in Feb. 1891 and was buried in the Big Springs Methodist Cemetery only a short distance from the farm he had purchased twenty years earlier. The children of Ralph and America scattered widely, with some settling in Madison and Crockett Counties Tennessee and others going to Mississippi or Texas. Eula and Mack Rob migrated to Texas but returned to make their home on the farm near Pinson, Tenn. where the hardship of farm life and child bearing drained the strength from Eula while still a young woman. She died on the Davis farm in the Bear Creek Community at forty-one years of age, and was laid to rest in the Big Springs Cemetery beside three of her children.