Major John Dunbar Howe

Major John Dunbar Howe was the sixth of eleven children and the second son of Daniel and Nancy Haven Howe. At age twenty-nine, he married fifteen-year-old Sarah Boyd Logan Shepherd and began married life on the Draper’s Valley farm she had inherited. Around 1838, he moved his growing family to Newbern, then Pulaski County’s principal community, where he operated a store and United States post office along the Valley Pike. Because the property stood on the principal stagecoach route through the region, it also functioned as a wayside tavern and gathering place.

John was sociable, humorous, musically inclined, and reflective. He played the fiddle while his young daughters danced and later wrote entertaining accounts of his experiences as a Newbern merchant. Around 1850, he exchanged his Newbern property and other considerations with his brother William for Sunnyside, the ancestral Howe homestead on Back Creek. By combining this property with other inherited and acquired land, he restored the estate to approximately its original boundaries. He later acquired the river farm known as Riverton and gave it to his son John Thomas Howe and his bride, Sallie De Jarnette, in 1866.

Image courtesy of Giles County Historical Association