Charles Betts,
neighbor of Gray Family
The Maple Hill Cemetery Stroll has included enactments of Virginia Betts in some of the years since my 2007 newspaper article about Charles Edward Betts and his son Edward Chambers Betts was published. Virginia Betts was a grandmother of Judge Advocate General Edward C. Betts, who organized the Nuremburg War Trials of various German Nazi generals and officials at the end of World War 2. The General never lived in Madison, but his grandparents did, as did his great grandparents. They were neighbors of the pioneer Madison-area family of William & Eleanor Gray, who owned the land around the old Providence Cumberland Presbyterian Church and deeded land to the church in the early 1800s.
Virginian Charles Edward Betts was among the first to settle in the area of today’s Madison, buying his land on the first day of legal purchase, February 2, 1818, which was 39 years before the town itself was established. The Charles Betts land was adjoining the Gray land, immediately south of the the Grays and the church. It included today’s location of the Madison Public Library and the Kroger shopping center, running roughly from what is now Brown’s Ferry Road in Madison northward to Gillespie Road, between Hughes Road and to the west of Balch Road.
Charles married Martha Cousins Chambers, sister of Alabama’s U. S. Senator Henry Chambers, for whom Alabama’s Chambers County is named. Henry Chambers was born in 1790 and started his career as a surgeon or physician. Henry also served in the Convention to draft Alabama’s first Constitution. Henry Chambers then served in the Alabama House of Representatives and subsequently had an unsuccessful run for Governor of the state. He later was elected as one of Alabama’s U. S. Senators, but he died after serving in that office for less than one year. Meanwhile, Charles Edward Betts and his wife Martha Cousins (Chambers) Betts had a son that they named Edward Chambers Betts, who was born in 1820 on Charles’ pre-Madison area plantation. Edward became a judge of Madison County’s County Court and also a trustee of the University of Alabama. He further became an Alabama legislator for several terms. Edward C. Betts was likewise Alabama’s first Commissioner of Agriculture, according to Owens’ HISTORY OF ALABAMA, Volume 4, page 141.
Edward C. Betts was born August 13, 1820, ten miles west of Huntsville on his father’s plantation, according to Owen’s book cited above. He lived until September 18, 1891, dying in Huntsville, but he had been educated at the University of Virginia and traveled abroad before entering the practice of law. Here he married Virginia Augusta Swope, who was a descendant of the Early family that included Confederate General Jubal Early and Bishop John Early, descendants from Carbri Lifichar, a King of Ireland born in 225 A. D. Edward retired to his father’s plantation for a time, but during the Civil War he was arrested, along with Madison citizens Dr. Richard Matthew Fletcher and James Harvey Pride, by the occupying Union forces as a spy. They were thought by Union Army officers to have facilitated the Confederate attack on Madison Station in May of 1864 and were under threat of hanging. After about three months in jail in Huntsville, a recently-transferred commander of the Union troops that had been stationed in the Madison area came rushing back to intervene. That Union officer knew these men quite well, and he had the men released before their threatened hanging. Edward eventually settled in Huntsville to live out his days.
The second-born child of Edward and Virginia (Swope) Betts was named Tancred Betts. Tancred was born in Huntsville in 1861. He graduated from the University of Alabama in 1881 and passed the bar exam in 1886. He became the County Attorney in 1898 and was appointed Judge of the Law and Equity Court in 1907. Tancred served as a trustee of Alabama Polytechnic Institute (later named as Auburn University), where he married Maude Minor Brown in 1888. They had two children, one of whom was Sallie LeRoy Betts, who married attorney James Harvey Pride, a grandson of the man of the same name who lived in Madison during the Civil War days. The other child of Tancred and Maud Betts was a later-generation Edward Chambers Betts, whose legal career began with education at the University of Alabama and continued throughout his Army career to involve him in setting up the Nuremburg trials.
The 1930 census showed that Tancred Betts had died by the time of the census, while attorney Edward Betts and his wife Pleasant were living in Washington DC, with children that had been born in the Philippine Islands and in Georgia. However, in the 1920 census, the Betts family of attorneys was intact, with Tancred living at 509 Franklin Street in Huntsville. Next door at 507 Franklin was the household of James H. Pride and his wife Sallie (Betts) Pride, while next door at 505 Franklin was the household of Edward Chambers Betts and his wife Pleasant. All three men were listed as attorneys, probably in practice together.
The 1930 census records also indicate that the street numbers may have been changed, because James H. Pride was still living with Sallie, but at 608 Franklin, with some of the same neighbors as in 1920. However, the widow of Tancred Betts was still living on Franklin Street, but at street number 607. In any event, the generations of the Betts families of Madison and Huntsville were keystones in the legal profession of the area and literally of the world after WW2, with ties to the earliest days of both Auburn University and the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. They represented their state and its educational institutions well through the years. They also left a lasting legacy in the Madison area.
As I spent about 4 or 5 years finding and recording cemeteries on the lands of Redstone Arsenal, coordinating with Beverly Curry, a staff archaeologist, I encountered several Black cemeteries where the historical records involved a Black Tancred Betts. That suggested that some of the former Black slaves of the Betts family retained the given names as well as the surnames that they had during servitude before the Civil War. Further historical investigations pointed toward the conclusion that some of the Black families had respect for their former “owners” – and that was often confirmed where it was found that after the Emancipation Proclamation they had been given 40 acres of former Betts land as their own. In fact, there were several court cases well after the conclusion of the Civil War where the White Tancred Betts as an attorney represented former slaves and took actions to preserve their rights to lands and other property.
As research into the Gray Cemetery lands adjoining the Betts property progressed, it was found that there was a Betts School long ago, located just across Balch Road from the southwest corner of the Gray Cemetery. Furthermore, three Betts Cemeteries are now indicated to be nearby. One is just a bit east of the southeast corner of the Gray Cemetery, and some local Black families have indicated that they are descendants of the former slaves and that some of their family members may well be buried in portions of the old Gray Cemetery. If so, there are no known tombstones to indicate such, but the vast majority of the graves there have no tombstones above ground today. One of the other Betts Cemeteries is on the east side of the small lake formed by Betts Spring, and another possible cemetery is in a nearby housing development close to the old Madison landfill in a wooded area.
Another aspect of the former Betts land is that there is now a small lake formed by the outflow of Betts Spring, which flows out from underneath the bluff where the Madison Water Plant is located south of Pumphouse Road off Gillispie Road. There are housing developments on the east and the west of the small lake. Plans and early explorations have led to preliminary actions being taken by the Madison Greenways & Trails group, along with the Land Trust organization, to develop a new public trail between Balch Road and the Betts Spring lake, reaching up to the south end of the Gray Cemetery. Upon completion, such a trail may be connected to other trails in the area. Because the water table (underground supply flowing down from northern Canada underneath the Continental Shelf of the United States) has dropped about 20 to 30 feet in modern times from that of the pioneer days, the flow into the Betts Spring lake is greatly diminished. That has allowed growth of small trees and masses of algae to grow in and overtake the small lake. In the “old days” of pioneer settlement and earlier, the flow rate would have kept the little lake clear and clean. However, it is still a major portion of the headwaters of what we today call Mill Creek, which even in the early 1900s had sufficient flow to run a gristmill that was
located on the northeast corner of the junction of Mill Road with the southern end of Balch Road. Some portions of the gristmill foundations are still evident at that site, which operated when the Mill Creek flow was much higher in volume. Things have greatly changed in many ways due to modern developments since the early pioneer White settlers arrived and lived on the land here.
