Drennan Love family collection

Drennan Love (1800-1873) was born in Chester County, South Carolina, the great-grandson of Irish immigrant James Love (c.1697-1760) who had settled first in Pennsylvania and then moved his family to South Carolina. The family prospered there but with the deaths of his parents, Janet Lockert Love (1772-1803) and Revolutionary War soldier Captain James Love (1763-1807), in quick succession, Drennan and his siblings were orphaned and Drennan was raised by an uncle.

In 1825 several members of the Love family moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where Drennan became a ferryman on the Black Warrior River at Northport. The Loves had been accompanied by the Cook family on their move west and in 1827 Drennan married Elizabeth Lovelace Cook (1807-1897). Seven years later, following the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek which opened former Choctaw land to white settlement, Drennan moved his family to Mississippi’s black prairie country at Crawford, Lowndes County, where he established a farm called Magowah. A house was built on his property in 1848 which remained until Highway 45 was built in the 1930s. Drennan also had a house in Columbus. Near his farm, he helped establish the Bethel Presbyterian Church and he continued to be an influential layman. Drennan was a commissioner for the Tombeckbee Presbytery to the General Assembly in Philadelphia in 1853 and possibly also attended the Assembly in Georgia in 1861 when the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America was formed.

Drennan and Elizabeth produced nine sons and three daughters: Mary Caroline (1827-1919), James Monroe (1830-1840), Sarah Melissa (1831-1880), Robert Miles (1833-1852), Matthew Henry (1835-1849), David Chelsea (1837-1918), John Calvin (1839-1908), James Drennan (1841-1938), Joseph Cornelius (1843-1862), Jane Elizabeth (b.1845), William Alexander (1848-1929), and Albert Clarence (1851-1884). Four sons served in the Confederate Army’s Prairie Guards, the 11th Mississippi Regiment, during the Civil War. David attended Davidson College in North Carolina from 1856 to 1860 and then studied law at Cumberland University in Tennessee until 1861 when he left for the war. Seriously wounded at Petersburg in 1864, he was invalided out of the army and became a teacher and then a farmer. After travelling west he returned to Mississippi and was elected to the Lowndes County Board of Supervisors, serving from 1876 to 1880. Active in the United Confederate Veterans, he wrote a history of the Prairie Guards. John also attended Davidson College and was a school teacher when he enlisted and was wounded at Gettysburg. Captured in April 1865, he was imprisoned and then released two months later. He returned to Lowndes County and became a farmer until 1869 when he moved to Leesburg, Florida, where he bought land, planted oranges and became a merchant.

James attended Presbyterian Synodial Junior College in La Grange, Tennessee, before the war. He was severely wounded at Gettysburg, lost a leg, and was captured. Exchanged in 1864, he returned home and then followed John to Florida. He married Mary Margaret Gaston (1856-1885) there and had a daughter but his wife, second child and father-in-law died in 1885. James married Mary’s cousin, Clara Neely Fox (1862-1937) the following year and later moved his family back to Oktibbeha County, Mississippi. He farmed with his son Albert Lee (1886-1967) at the Bell schoolhouse community just north of Starkville, remaining active into his nineties. Joseph joined the army a year after his brothers in April 1862 but died soon after of the measles and was buried at Williamsburg, Virginia. Albert graduated from the Cooper Institute at Daleville, Mississippi, after the war. He studied medicine in Mobile, Alabama, Louisville, Kentucky, and New Orleans, Louisiana. He was practicing in Darrowville, Louisiana, in 1878 when he died of yellow fever.

William served during the Civil War, enlisting in Company H of the 6th Regiment of the Mississippi Cavalry in 1863. He saw fighting at Harrisburg, Mississippi, in July 1864, surrendered at Citronelle, Alabama, on May 4, 1865, and was paroled at Gainesville, Alabama, eight days later. On his return to Lowndes County, he entered Summerville Institute at Gholson, Mississippi, and then worked on his father’s farm. William joined his brothers in Florida for about a year in the early 1870s but then returned to Mississippi and the family farm. He joined the Prairie Guards of the state militia in the 1870s, commanded the 1st Cavalry Battalion of the Mississippi National Guard in the 1890s, and retired with the rank of brigadier-general in 1906. He was also active with the United Confederate Veterans Association, acting as Adjutant for Camp 27 at Columbus and promoted to Colonel in 1923. At that time he was also president of the Mississippi Confederate Pension Board. Among his other activities were helping to establish the Patrons of Husbandry Grange, Magowah, in 1873 and becoming the Magowah postmaster in 1896. A stalwart Democrat, William was elected to the Mississippi Legislature, representing the western district of Lowndes County between 1892 and 1894, and later became a state senator from the 25th District from 1912 to 1914. Like his father, William was an active member of the Southern Presbyterian Church and was a commissioner to the General Assembly in Augusta, Georgia, in 1886. An enthusiastic amateur archeologist and historian, he contributed many articles to local newspapers and journals, including the Publications of Mississippi Historical Society and the Confederate Veteran. William married Jessie Giles Cook (1866-1947), a first cousin who had come to nurse his mother, in 1893, and the couple had two children: William Joseph “Will” (1896-1969) and Elizabeth Lovelace (1901-1990).

After graduation from Old Franklin Academy, Columbus, William Joseph worked for the cotton buyer Frank P. Phillips from October 1913. Between 1916 and 1918 he attended Davidson College but did not graduate until after the First World War. Reputedly the first to volunteer from Lowndes County, William joined the Marine Corps in June 1918, trained at Parris Island, South Carolina, and sailed for France in September 1918 with the 13th Regiment. Demobilized in August 1919, William returned to Mississippi and the Phillips firm, becoming manager and head classer in 1930. After Phillips’ death in 1949, he established his own company, W.J. Love Cotton Company, in August 1950, acting as a cotton buyer, shipper, and exporter to Europe, which he visited on business several times. William also became a director of the National Bank of Commerce, Columbus in 1946, and vice-president in 1962. Following family tradition, he was commissioner from the East Mississippi Presbytery to the Presbyterian General Assemblies in Montreat, North Carolina, in 1945, and Atlanta, Georgia, in 1959. An avid student of history like his father, he was president of the Mississippi Historical Society, and director and vice-president of the Columbus Y.M.C.A. William married Grace Electa Mills (1897-1979) in North Carolina in 1923, where her mother, Anna H. Mills, worked for the Y.M.C.A Blue Ridge Association student conference center at Black Mountain and maintained a summer cabin. Anna Mills had previously been matron at Mississippi Normal College in Hattiesburg, where Grace was a student teacher in 1917. Grace later taught at Davenport College in Lenoir, North Carolina. Grace and Will had one child, Anna Grace (b. 1924), a graduate of Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus.