Greene–Jones War facts for kids
The Greene–Jones War was a Appalachian Mountain clan feud in the United States reputed to be second only to that of the Hatfield–McCoy feud in scale, duration, and number of people killed. At least sixteen people were killed during the course of the feud, and many others were seriously injured. The feud took place primarily in the border areas of Hawkins County (formerly part of Sullivan County, North Carolina, one of the earliest Tennessee counties and said to have a large Melungeon population), Washington County, Claiborne County, Hancock County, Tennessee (created when Hawkins County, Tennessee was subdivided), and Lee County, Virginia, not far from Cumberland Gap, the narrow Appalachian Mountain pass sometimes called The Wilderness Road leading into Kentucky.
The Greene ancestry
Most of the history of this feud is found in family records, particularly in a self-published small-edition book by Alton Lee Greene, a genealogist who lived in Sanger, Texas. Alton Lee Greene (a 20th-century descendant of the feuding families) traced the genealogy of the descendants of American colonist Judge William Greene, a judge in the Court of Common Pleas who was born in Lincolnshire, England in 1671 and died in 1722 in Hunterdon County, New Jersey. Judge Greene married Joanna "Hannah" Reeder, the daughter of John Reeder and Joanna Burroughs Reeder, who was born in 1699 in Newtown, Long Island, New York. Judge William Greene and Hannah settled in the area of Ewing, New Jersey and built the William Green House (Ewing Township, New Jersey), now on the National Historic Register and located on the campus of The College of New Jersey. Despite fund-raising efforts, the old farmhouse near where the troops of George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River once rested during the Revolutionary War, has never been fully restored.
Judge William Greene and Joanna Reeder Greene were the great-grandparents of Jeremiah Greene, who along with other Greene relatives migrated to an area near Rowan, North Carolina (a vast county of indefinite boundaries formed in 1753), where they formed a community called The Jersey Settlement by joining West Jersey residents who left New Jersey due to their unwillingness to adhere to the demands of Colonel Daniel Coxe, an English Colonial landowner and physician. Disgusted by Coxe's rampant political corruption, the Greene family settled near the Yadkin River in North Carolina and started the Jersey Settlement Meeting House, now on the National Historic Register. Jeremiah's family migrated to the Jersey Settlement and then to Hancock County, Tennessee, where his descendants figured prominently in the Greene–Jones War.
How the war began
The Greene-Jones war entered the annals of folklore and national myth, and it is difficult to establish a true time line and documented narrative. This is partly the case because of the name changes of both the people and the locales. By the late 1880s the Greene family and the Jones family, mostly farmers with large plots of land, had lived in the narrow mountains of Hancock County many years and had become clannish families in which second cousins married or in which all the many children of one local family married all the children of a neighboring family. Most of the activity of the Greene-Jones feud occurred in an area in and around what is now Claiborne County, Tennessee, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park and the Pinnacle Overlook and Gap Cave in nearby Kentucky and Lee County, Virginia, and not far from the area of strife between the Hatfields and McCoys.
Strife between the Greene and Jones families is said by some chroniclers to have begun even before the American Civil War. The Greene–Jones War has many similarities to the Hatfield-McCoy feud.
Alfred Greene, born 1827 in Hawkins County, was a reconnaissance scout during the American Civil War and did not join either the Union Army or the Army of the Confederacy. He was killed in 1863 by a gang of three bushwackers when he secretly went home to visit his wife who was expecting a baby. The gang positioned themselves around his house and killed him as soon as he was seen outside the house. When his brothers Robert and David, who were Union soldiers, came home after the war, they killed two of the men who had killed Alfred.
The "end" of the war
Joseph Greene was the son of James and Lucy Lanham Greene. He was born in 1844 on a farm near the Luther post office and died in 1910 in Hancock County. He joined the Union Army and served in the Cavalry for nearly four years. He was wounded once, captured once at the Battle of Lookout Mountain, escaped and joined the army of General Sherman on his march-to-the-sea campaign. When the Greene–Jones War broke out and he was asked to take part, "he told his brothers that he had killed all the men he ever wanted to kill during the Civil War, and so he took no part in the Greene-Jones War." To end the Greene–Jones War, the Governor of Tennessee declared martial law and sent in the Tennessee State Militia.
In 1888, The Tennessean, a Nashville newspaper, reported in its front page domestic news summary that, "The Jones and Greene feud in Hancock County progresses. The same year, the Daily Democrat of Huntingdon, Indiana reported that the battle still raged and that both sides were heavily armed.
In April of 1890, The Comet of Johnson City, Tennessee reported the murder of Thos. J. Berry, a Justice of the Peace "in the 19th district of this country" when he went to his spring just after dark to assess the damage from a storm. F. M. Burton was with Berry at the time and recognized the shooter but refused to identify him. The coroner's jury held an inquest and decided "that Thomas J. Berry came to his death from a pistol fired by the hands of Asa Jones." Asa Jones was the leader of the Jones faction in the Greene–Jones War.
In May 1890 the Rogersville Herald of Rogersville, Tennessee reported the surrender of Ace Jones. Later, with a byline from the Rogersville Herald, The Comet of Johnson City reported what was thought to be "the finale of the late Greene-Jones War in Hancock County." The title of the article is "Nolle Prosequi Entered". This and other valuable historic newspaper resources are available in Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, a project of the Library of Congress.
Patsy Hatfield Lawson, a nationally recognized storyteller and descendant of both the Hatfield and Greene feuding families once said, "the one thing that distinguished these feuds from each other was that the New York Times did not report on [the Greene-Jones War] as it had in the Hatfield-McCoy feud, therefore, the Greene-Jones feud went relatively unnoticed by the rest of the world." However, the NYT reported in 1893 that Hiram Church of Hancock County, a bail bondsman for W. M. Hobbs who had been under a $10,000 bond, went to Knoxville before leaving for Texas where Hobbs had run away and just been captured after escaping from a ten-year prison sentence for the murder of Sheriff Greene.
