No letter or photograph of Merritt Brown is known. What survives is a trail of records: census pages, a school bill, his service cards, the Roll of Honor, his parole, store accounts, a druggist's bill and a headstone application. Together they tell his story.
Merritt was born in Tennessee about 1844, the second son of Benjamin F. and Catharine A. Hunter Brown, and was named for his father's older brother. In 1850 the census taker found him, age six and "attending school," in his parents' household in Marshall County, Mississippi.
By 1851 the family had settled at Collierville, on the Memphis & Charleston Railroad. In 1860 he was sixteen and still in school, and on May 23, 1861, his father paid Sylvan Academy for six months' "tuition of son Merit," $24.
On May 15, 1861, eight days before that tuition bill was written, he enrolled at Germantown in Capt. R. P. Bateman's company, which became Company C of the 4th Tennessee Infantry, the Wigfall Grays. He gave his age as eighteen; the censuses make him a year younger.
He was with the company when the regiment reorganized after Shiloh in the spring of 1862, and present through the Kentucky campaign and Perryville. At Murfreesboro, on the last day of 1862, the company went forward with Stewart's brigade through the cedars west of Stones River. Afterward its men chose him, then a private, for the Confederate Roll of Honor. The roll for January and February 1863 shows him as 4th corporal.
In September 1863, the month of Chickamauga, he was promoted to 2nd corporal. On September 11 of that month his father died at Collierville. On October 3 the War Department published the Roll of Honor for Murfreesboro in General Orders No. 131: "Corpl. M. R. Brown, Co. C." He was present at Missionary Ridge and through the winter at Dalton, Georgia. The last muster roll in his file, for March and April 1864, carries him present as 2nd corporal.
From May 1864 to May 1865 his file is silent. When the war ended he was in Alabama. He surrendered with the Department of Alabama, Mississippi and East Louisiana, and on May 11, 1865, he was paroled at Gainesville, Alabama, with men of Forrest's command, giving his residence as Collierville, Shelby County. How he came to be there is not recorded.
He came home to a town the war had largely burned. In January 1867 or 1868 he married Mattie D. Mangum, a North Carolinian. In July 1870 the census listed him as a railroad agent, twenty-six, with his wife Mattie and their daughter Lena, two. A few days later a second daughter, Mattie Duncan Brown, was born; she died the next June and was buried in Magnolia Cemetery. Two more daughters followed, Ida in 1872 and Minnie about 1874.
He also kept a store. The claims later filed against his estate show a working Collierville merchant buying from Memphis wholesalers in 1877 and 1878, with modest debts. When he died, the Memphis Daily Appeal called him "a prominent merchant."
In the late summer of 1878 yellow fever reached Collierville. A druggist's account records quinine, spirits of nitre and other remedies charged to him from August 30 to September 3, the last a bottle of carbolic acid, the disinfectant used in fever houses. He died in early September, most likely on the 2nd, among the town's first dead. He was buried in Magnolia Cemetery, opened that spring on land his brother William had sold for it.
His estate was administered by "C. A. Brown," his mother, Catharine, and stayed open until 1881. In 1880 the census found Lena, Ida and Minnie living with her.
For sixty-two years his grave had no headstone. On January 15, 1940, Mrs. B. M. Cowan of Collierville applied to the War Department for a government stone for "the UNMARKED grave of a veteran." A clerk checked each detail against his service record, and the stone was shipped on May 10, 1940. It gives his rank, his company and his regiment. It gives no dates.
Parents and grandparents. His grandfather, Benjamin Brown of Williamson County, Tennessee, died in 1835. The court papers of his estate name his widow, Nancy, and his four children, among them Merritt's father and his uncle and namesake.
Benjamin F. Brown (1816–1863), father. A farmer who moved from Williamson County to Marshall County, Mississippi, and then to Collierville. He died on September 11, 1863, while Merritt was with the army in Georgia.
Catharine A. Hunter Brown (1817–1915), mother. Widowed in the middle of the war, she settled her husband's estate and then her son's, and raised his daughters. She died in 1915 at Leiper's Fork, in her ninety-ninth year.
Merritt R. Brown Sr. (c. 1810–1851), uncle. His father's older brother and his namesake. He farmed next door in Marshall County in 1850 and died in Shelby County in October 1851.
Mattie D. Mangum Brown, wife. Born in North Carolina about 1846. Her maiden name is confirmed by the newspaper notice of their marriage and by their daughter Ida's Social Security application, which names her parents as Merritt Brown and Mattie Mangum.
Daughters. Lena (born about 1868), Mattie Duncan (1870–1871), Ida (born February 23, 1872, later Ida Brown Leach) and Minnie (born about 1874).
Brothers and sisters. Eight brothers and sisters appear with him in the census of 1850 or 1860: William, Augusta, John, Matthews, Catherine, Frank, Susan and Lalla. William J. Brown (1839–1912) served in Company E, 13th Tennessee, and in 1878 sold the land around the family burial ground for Magnolia Cemetery. Matthews Weber Brown (1848–1942) became a planter near Clarksdale, Mississippi. Frank Howard Brown (1851–1935) traveled for the railway express companies for most of his life. Lalla Brown Redford (1861–1925) gave her mother a home at Leiper's Fork.
The Browns' prosperity rested in part on the labor of enslaved people. When Merritt's grandfather's estate was divided in January 1836, eighteen people were allotted among the heirs. Their names are recorded here so that they can be found.
To Nancy Brown: Cyrus, 40; Avy, 33; Judy, 22; Daniel, 1. To Merritt R. Brown Sr.: Randal, 16; Mariah, 12; Alsey, 3. To John W. Brown: Solomon, 29; Patience, 19. To the Allens: Fanny, 35; Narcissa, 12; Charles, 6; Joe, 3; Wiley, 1. To Benjamin F. Brown, Merritt's father: Jane, 14; Tom, 9; Rachel, 8; Peggy, 7.
In 1850 Merritt's father held five people whose names the census did not record, and in 1860 twenty, in five slave houses, also unnamed. Anyone researching these families is welcome to get in touch through the Contact page.
The story of Corporal Merritt R. Brown, the Wigfall Grays and their town is told in An Honor Unearned: From the Streets of Collierville, Tennessee, to Edgefield, South Carolina, by Michael Louis Meece. Available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. More about the book at anhonorunearned.org.