Murfreesboro, Tennessee: Cannonsburg for a Month

For about a month in 1811, the planned town that became Murfreesboro, Tennessee, was Cannonsburg, until lawmakers renamed it for Col. Hardy Murfree. Murfree was a Revolutionary soldier who held land in the area under a military grant from North Carolina, and nobody had even bought a lot in town yet when the name changed.

A fight over the county seat

Rutherford County already had a seat of justice, at a place called Jefferson, but people wanted one closer to the middle of the county. Goodspeed’s 1886 county history says the legislature named seven commissioners on October 17, 1811, to find a new site with “good water and a central location.” Several landowners competed for it, and one of them, Charles Ready, threw a big dinner with toasts to win the commissioners over to a site called Rucker’s place.

It didn’t work. The commissioners also visited Capt. William Lytle, who offered 60 acres south of what Goodspeed calls the “Murfree Spring Branch,” and they took his offer, four votes to three. The losing side was so sore, Goodspeed says, that they refused to sign the deeds to the lots.

Cannonsburg, briefly

The new town started out on paper as Cannonsburg, “in honor of Gov. Cannon,” Goodspeed writes, without giving a first name. Henry Gannett’s 1905 book on American place names lists a Newton Cannon as governor of Tennessee from 1835 to 1839, and Goodspeed’s own county lists show a Newton Cannon in the state senate from 1811 to 1815. If he’s the man, the “Gov.” was a title he picked up years later. Goodspeed doesn’t say for sure, so treat that as a maybe.

Then the legislature changed its mind. An act amending the October law switched the name “from Cannonsburg to ‘Murfreesborough.’” As it turns out, Goodspeed gives two dates for that act in the same book: November 15 in one chapter and November 19, 1811, in another. Either way, Cannonsburg lasted only about a month, and the first lots weren’t sold until June 1812.

Remembered in the deeds

Gannett backs up the Murfree name in a single entry: Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and the town of the same name in Hertford County, North Carolina, were both “named for Col. Hardy Murfree, an officer of the Revolution.” So if you’ve been to both, you’ve been to two towns named for the same colonel.

Murfree’s heirs cared about the name, too. In 1818, Goodspeed says, two of his legatees, Isaac Hilliard and his wife, Mary Moore, of Halifax County, North Carolina, deeded a block of town lots to the people living on them. They did it out of “a love of the people of the place, a desire to make their titles perfect and for the remembrance of Col. Murfree in the name.” That same year, the federal place-names record says, Murfreesboro became the state capital, a job it held until 1826.

Sources & further reading

• Goodspeed Publishing Co., History of Tennessee, Maury, Williamson, Rutherford, Wilson, Bedford and Marshall counties edition (1886). The commissioners appointed October 17, 1811, Ready’s dinner, Lytle’s offer of 60 acres south of the “Murfree Spring Branch,” the four-to-three vote, the refusal to sign the deeds, the lot sale advertised for June 12, 1812, and the name changed “from Cannonsburg to ‘Murfreesborough’” by an act of November 15 (pp. 814–815); Cannonsburg “in honor of Gov. Cannon,” the act of November 19, 1811, Hardy Murfree’s military grant from North Carolina, no lots bought until June 1812, and the 1818 deed by Isaac Hilliard and Mary Moore “for the remembrance of Col. Murfree in the name” (p. 826). The Williamson County lists in the same volume show Newton Cannon in the state senate for 1811 to 1815.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States, 2nd ed. (U.S. Geological Survey, 1905). Murfreesboro in Tennessee and in Hertford County, North Carolina, “named for Col. Hardy Murfree, an officer of the Revolution” (p. 218); Cannon County named for Newton Cannon, “governor of the State in 1835-39” (p. 67).
• GNIS feature 1295105 (U.S. Geological Survey). Murfreesboro as state capital from 1818 to 1826.