[Granville-Hough] 6 May 2009 - Bishop
Trustees for Granville W. Hough
gwhough-trust at oakapple.net
Sat May 6 05:18:41 PDT 2017
Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 07:11:07 -0700
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Bishop - 6 May 2009
Some old oral legends are quite interesting when told in eye-witness
detail. Grampa.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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: ôSay, IÆm your kin, I
married Polly, daughter of Lod, and you should not treat me this way.ö
To which Wild Bill and Neese conferred and said: ôIf you married Polly,
the ugliest girl ever born in SullivanÆs 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.ö 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 TillmanÆs 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 opponentÆs name is not recalled, but he may have lost at
least one of his ears in the prolonged bout. The recall is that BishopÆs
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 TomÆs 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 PadgettÆs 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
SullivanÆs Hollow. The bully thought it great fun to beat up the new
minister until Uncle Jim got his finger behind the bullyÆs 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 SullivanÆs Hollow, I
would consider that just a typical insulting joke by Wild Bill and
Neese. I was schoolmates to some of PollyÆs 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 do document it.)
More information about the Granville-Hough
mailing list