Marshall County, Tennessee: History
Marshall County was created in 1836 from parts of Giles, Bedford, Lincoln, and Maury counties. It was named after the American jurist John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
The economy was based on agriculture in the antebellum years and well into the twentieth century. Planters had depended on the labor of enslaved African Americans to work the commodity crops of tobacco and hemp, as well as care for thoroughbred horses and other quality livestock. The breed known as the Tennessee Walking Horse was developed here.
After the war, blacks and whites struggled to adjust to emancipation and a free labor market. Freedmen founded Needmore as a community in Marshall County after the Civil War where they could live as neighbors and be relatively free of white supervision.
Whites committed violence against freedmen to re-establish and maintain dominance after the war. In the period after Reconstruction and into the early 20th century, whites in Marshall County committed eight lynchings of African Americans. This was the fifth-highest total of any county in the state, but three other counties, including two nearby, also had eight lynchings each.
Among these lynchings were the murders of John Milligan (also spelled Millikin) and John L. Hunter in the Needmore settlement near the county seat of Lewisburg in August 1903. Governor James B. Frazier offered a reward for information, as Whitecaps were blamed for the deaths, and the state was trying to eliminate this secret, vigilante group. In the early 20th century, numerous African Americans left the county during the period of the Great Migration to northern and midwestern industrial cities for work.
Three Tennessee governors—Henry Horton, Jim Nance McCord, and Buford Ellington—were each living in Marshall County at the time of their election as governor.