[Granville-Hough] 6 May 2009 - Bishop

[Trustees and Executors for Granville W. Hough]

Some old oral legends are quite interesting when told in eye-witness 
detail.

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BISHOP

Tillman Bishop was once on the way from his home in Simpson County to 
Ellisville when he was caught on the road by Will Bill and Neese 
Sullivan and was plowed with a mule until noon. When they were about to 
put Tillman in a stable with corn, he protested: “Say, I’m your kin, I 
married Polly, daughter of Lod, and you should not treat me this way.” 
To which Wild Bill and Neese conferred and said: “If you married Polly, 
the ugliest girl ever born in Sullivan’s Hollow, you deserve the best we 
have. You just come in our house and sit right down at the head of our 
table and eat everything you want. We are sorry we did not know who you 
were.” Tillman said he had a good meal but was careful to go home by 
another road.
The Bishops were big, raw-boned, rough and tough frontiersmen. It must 
have been Tillman’s father who was engaged in the Westville 
bare-knuckles, no-holds barred fight recalled in Simpson County. The 
first county seat of Simpson County was Westville in the south central 
part of the county, north of present-day Jeff Davis County. It was a 
regular place for raw fighting, and the Sullivan sons were regulars, all 
trained by their father, the original Hog Tom.
This Bishop got challenged to a fight, to which he agreed as to time, 
place, and conditions at Old Westville. Old Tom Sullivan was to be the 
referee. The opponent’s name is not recalled, but he may have lost at 
least one of his ears in the prolonged bout. The recall is that Bishop’s 
teeth were so full of gristle that they had to use pocket knives to cut 
and pick it out of his teeth.
Hog Tom must have known how Bishop felt because he was recalled by his 
first wife, Maude Elizabeth (Arnold), as fighting the meanest man in 
Alabama all day and finally resorting to biting. Maude said she had to 
pick the flesh out of Tom’s teeth after it was over. This must have been 
in the 1810 era in the Tombigbee District of then Mississippi Territory, 
later in Alabama..
There is so much similarity between the two stories that one wonders if 
Bishop and Sullivan descendants got the principals mixed up. However, 
the technique must have been well known as my great-uncle Porter Arender 
bit off Leonard or Leander Padgett’s ear in a bloody bout in the North 
Cohay community of Old Salem. An even more gruesome act of desperation 
in a hand to hand fight was to jab your finger into the opponent's eye 
and jerk out his eyeball. I cannot name anyone to whom that happened, 
but I learned about it as a child. I have been told that my uncle Jim 
Richardson, on becoming the new pastor of Poplarville Baptist Church in 
Pearl River County, was goaded, harassed, and attacked by a Poplarville 
bully who apparently did not know Uncle Jim had been reared in 
Sullivan’s Hollow. The bully thought it great fun to beat up the new 
minister until Uncle Jim got his finger behind the bully’s eyeball and 
told him he was going to jerk his eye out unless he promised never to 
bother him or his church members. The bully agreed to the terms and that 
was the end of the story.
As for Polly being the ugliest girl ever born in Sullivan’s Hollow, I 
would consider that just a typical insulting joke by Wild Bill and 
Neese. I was schoolmates to some of Polly’s granddaughters in Magee High 
School, and, though lean and lithe, they were anything but ugly. They 
were also not shy.
According to Great-Grandma Nancy (Bowen) Arender, one of the original 
Bishop women married her cousin, one of "them thar Whitfields" who 
became Governor of Mississippi. She could remember meeting that couple 
in Raleigh during Civil War times. Grandma Arender's own grandmother was 
Betsy Whitfield, daughter of William "Billy" Whitfield of SC and MS. (My 
own research discloses that William Whitfield was a member of the SC 
Legislature in the 1800 era before he showed up in MS; and that all the 
NC and SC Whitfields were one extended family of early immigrants. The 
two descendants who became Mississippi governors were cousins, and 
Grandma Arender claimed they were both her cousins. I believe she was 
correct, but was not able to document it.)