Historian Shelby Foote was related to Fielding Lewis of Fredericksburg. The Footes were among many Fredericksburg-area families that moved to Mississippi in the early years. By Paula S. Felder

Date published: 8/20/2005

THE RECENT DEATH of Civil War historian and author Shelby Foote of Memphis, Tenn., was of great interest to me. Because of my research into Fredericksburg's own Fielding Lewis family, I thought I recalled that Foote had a Lewis connection.

Sure enough, Shelby Foote, a Mississippi native, was the great-great-great-great-grandson of Fielding Lewis Sr. (1725-1781), proprietor of Kenmore and brother-in-law of George Washington. And Fredericksburg was the beginning site of his Lewis line.

But what started out to be a brief column on Foote's connection with Fredericksburg-area history turned me onto a path of discovery linking me up to my own Mississippi origins.

Shelby Foote was descended from Fielding Lewis Jr., whose spendthrift ways had gravely troubled his father. He ran through his inheritance in Frederick County, and left a widow and two needy daughters from his second marriage.

After their father's death in 1803, Robert Lewis, Fielding Jr.'s younger brother, became the girls' mentor. Robert was really the sympathetic linchpin of his family. He was living on the farm across from Fredericksburg that he had recently acquired from the estate of the late James Hunter, the owner of the Rappahannock Forge.

Robert named the farm Pine Grove, as it is known today. (Because of many 19th-century rearrangements, its history has been confused with the Washington farm, which it adjoined.)

Several marriages of the next generation of Lewises took place there before Robert Lewis moved to Fredericksburg, where he served as mayor in the 1820s. On Wednesday evening, Nov. 15, 1809, according to the Fredericksburg Virginia Herald, Fielding Jr.'s daughter Catharine and Henry Chew Dade were married at Pine Grove. Shelby Foote was descended from that marriage.

By 1835, Catharine and Henry Dade were in the new county of Noxubee on the eastern boundary of the new state of Mississippi. Except for the fertile delta, Mississippi was mostly Indian territory when it was admitted to the Union in 1817. But between 1830 and 1835, the Indians lost their lands by "treaty." This accounts for the influx of population in that decade. Sixteen counties, including Noxubee, were created in one day, Dec. 23, 1833.

In November 1836, their daughter Lucinda married Hezekiah W. Foote, another newcomer from Virginia. He became a judge and a prominent landowner, as well as the patriarch of this Mississippi clan.

Date published: 8/20/2005