Cynthia Nicholson Owen
Copied from Nashville Tennessean, November 2, 1945
Cynthia Nicholson Owen
(Cynthia Nicholson Owen was the daughter of Jesse and Amie Walker Nicholson. She was born October 23, 1845 and died in Cheatham County, Tennessee in 1947. In 1861 she married Thomas Rufus Owen. She was buried at Forest Hill Cemetery in Ashland City)
Mrs. Cynthia Nicholson Owen of Ashland City, who recently celebrated her 99th birthday anniversary, has lived to see her country engaged in five wars, the Mexican, Civil War, Spanish-American and World War I and II. The rumbling echoes of the guns at Fort Donelson ‘firing on my friends’ is still vivid in her mind, and Mrs. Owen scoff at present day restrictions and privations when she recalls that during those days coffee was a dollar a pound and sugar could not be obtained at any price.
Aunt Cynthia, as she is affectionately known to her numerous friends in this county, was born in the Thomasville community of Cheatham County, although she once told an inquisitive Yankee soldier that she was born ‘at the upper end of nowhere in greenbriers.’
She was one of eight children of a bookmaker and was reared in a log cabin with straw on the floor for bedding. Her father finally acquired 200 acres of land and 15 slaves, but she never saw a cook stove until after the Civil War. She wonders how the women of today would feel about carrying their clothes a mile to the branch and beat them on a ‘battling bench’ until they were clean. Aunt Cynthia’s clothes were the products of her own skill. She carded the wool, spun the thread and wove the cloth before she actually got down to the business of making her dress.
Women’s hats in those days, she admits with a twinkle, were out of this world just as they are today. They were all made by hand and were mostly bonnets. Helena Rubenstein had nothing on Aunt Cynthia in making her own cosmetics. With the aid of some pokeberry juice and burnt mussel shells, she and her companions would ‘pretty up’ for the pea shellings and other popular forms of entertainment, to say nothing of the cotillions where she never missed a set all night long.
The grand old lady recalls walking five miles to school, using logs for a seat and desk, wrote with a goose quill pen, worked her arithmetic on a slate and went through the ‘blue-back’ speller five times.
She has never forgiven the Yankees for making her take the oath of allegiance at Clarksville. Before she could make the regulation mark, the Yankee soldier remarked that Mrs. Owen was ‘the stubbornest wench I ever saw,’ she recalls with a chuckle. Her late husband, Thomas Rufus Owen was a storekeeper and carriage trimmer, but at the time Sumpter was fired on, he was a medical student at old Carroll County School at McLemoresville. Along with other students he volunteered and served for four years with the 19th Tennessee Regiment. He died 37 years ago. Aunt Cynthia has been a member of the Methodist church for 79 years. She has five living children, the oldest of whom is 76, 34 grandchildren, 65 great grandchildren and 11 great great grandchildren.”