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Photo: Betsy Phillips
In my hunt for headstones made by Nashville artist William Edmondson, I ended up at two African American cemeteries in Davidson County with, sadly, no Edmondsons, but complicated histories that are worthwhile to try to understand. We’ll get to the second one in the future.
Today, let’s focus on the Bryant Town Family Cemetery out in Donelson. Sherod Bryant came to Nashville before 1820. He was born in the early 1780s in either Virginia or North Carolina. A lot of things get said about Bryant, but tracking down actual primary sources is difficult. I’m certainly no exhaustive Bryant scholar, but it doesn’t appear that any trained historian is which is a shame, because there’s a lot of strange stuff going on with Bryant that would be interesting to know about.