Daughter of Robert and Mary Mann. Wife of Benjamin Franklin Bell.

Although no marriage record has been found, Mary and Ben were most probably married about 1840 in Davidson County TN. Mary would sometimes laugh and say, "I was a Mann who married a man". She and Ben made their home on the little 50 acre farm she had inherited from her father in 1834. Over the next 20 years they had 11 known children - 6 boys and 5 girls. Along the way, another young girl came into the household who was said to have been Ben's sister. Mary and Ben lost three of their children when these were still quite young. When Ben died of an apparent aneurism in 1860, Mary had 9 children, including Ben's sister, still in her household. The youngest, Caroline, was born either shortly before or shortly after her father died. Mary never remarried.

Family lore: During the Civil War, several soldiers came onto Mary's property and set about stealing her hogs. She is said to have grabbed an axe and ran down to the pen. In her bare feet, she climbed up on the split rail fence and, waving the axe, fiercly informed the soldiers they were not going to steal her hogs. Mary must have been convincing and, for whatever reason, she won out and kept her hogs.

Family lore: About 1872, one of Mary's sons, James, left home. He wrote his sweetheart and told her he had "found a sack of gold" and was coming back to marry her. No one ever heard from him again. At some point, Mary hired a detective to find out what happened to him. The detective traced James to the Red River, assumed to be the river of that name in Robertson County TN, but could find no trace of him after that.

In 1899 Mary had a deed drawn up that set aside her family cemetery as a separate parcel from the rest of her farm. She appointed two family members as trustees and directed that they would be trustees "during their natural lives and at their death then to their successors in trust who must be the next nearest relation one male and one female generation after generation forever". The cemetery that remains today is only about 1/6th of that laid out in Mary's deed. The rest was given over to developers in the 1990's.

In early 1902 Mary became ill with the flu which led to a fatal stroke. At the age of 80, she passed away on March 27, 1902 at her home on the farm she had inherited from her father almost 70 years before.

The inscription on her headstone is the beginning words of a hymn written in the late 1800's. It reads:

I would not live always
I ask not to stay


Contributor note: Mary (Mann) Bell was my great-great grandmother.