My Genealogy Hound

J. H. Forgason, tobacco merchant, was born November 11, 1829. He is one of thirteen children of Dixon and Hannah (Towson) Forgason. The father, born in Virginia about 1795, came with his father to Tennessee about 1810 and settled in Smith County, now Macon County. He was for many years a respected class-leader in the Methodist Episcopal Church. He died in 1861. The mother was born near where her son now resides and died in September, 1876. Educated in Macon County, our subject married, December 14, 1856, Amanda Rison. Their ten children are Edgar B., Lula M. (deceased), Mary H. (now Mrs. Wakefield), Jno. H., Cora M. (deceased), William J., Herbert, Myrtle A., Jas. A. (deceased) and Ernest L. Reared on a farm and thrown on his own resources at twenty-one, he followed various occupations until the breaking out of the civil war, when he, in the fall of 1862, enlisted in Company D, Fifteenth Tennessee Cavalry, and served until he was captured near Pomeroy, Ohio, taken to Camp Chase, then to Camp Douglass, Chicago, where he remained until the close of the war. He has been an able magistrate for many years. He owns a farm of about seventy-five acres, six miles south of La Fayette. He, his wife and eldest daughter are members of the Missionary Baptist Church. His grandfather Towson was a soldier of the Revolution and came from Wales to Smith County about 1790.