DEDICATION

This undertaking could not have been possible without the wealth of information and untiring work of     Jane Covington and the late Marie Crunk and Miss Jonnie Demonbreun. We dedicate this effort to their efforts. This is also dedicated to the memory of Alma Burgess, Joe Bellenfant, Jim Patton and Robert Wilson, whose contributions made this possible.

BEGINNINGS

The area we now call College Grove was setteled about 1800. In 1778, William Ogilvie and his son-in-law, James Allison each purchased 400 acres of land, which was said to have cane brakes and Indians. Another pioneer, Archelus Hughes, received a large tract of land from the United States Government for his service in the Revolutionary War, and he built the first house in College Grove - the one now owned by the Frank McPeak family. Mr. Hughes later built a brick house on what is now known as the J. W. Bellenfant place, but this building was destroyed by the cyclone that stormed through College Grove on March 18, 1925. William Jordan, another early settler, had 3,000 acres, some of which were sold during the Reconstruction Period to make the Landis, Bellenfant and William Jordan farms. William Demonbreum (son of the famous Timothy Demonbreum, one of the first white men to come to Nashville) also came early to this area.

North of the present Bellenfant-Arno Road were the lands of Watson Gentry, Willian Baker Dobson and Dr. William B. Webb. These families, living on widely-scattered homesteads, went to stores, schools and churches in neighboring Triune, Beaver Dam, Owen Hill and Harpeth Lick until the North-South Turnpike was built around 1841. By 1850, many homes had been built along this turnpike, and in the 1850 to 1860 period, schools and churches were built where the present community stands. This village was called Poplar Grove.

Later, when the Post Office was moved to Poplar Grove from Owen Hill, Mr. John Covington, Mr. James Allison and Mr. James S. Ogilvie learned that there was already a Poplar Grove Post Office in Tennessee; thereforebecause a men's college was surrounded by a grove of chestnut, oak and poplar trees, the name College Grove was chosen. (Poplar Grove, in Gibson County, opened its Post Office in 1831. It closed in 1853.)

The lands north of what is now the Bellenfant-Arno Road remained as farm land , but in the 1850's some of the Ogilvie and Allison lands were subdivided and nearly all of the town was established south of this road. herein the earlist days there is said to have been, in addition to schools, churches and the post office, several businesses which included general stores, grocery stores, a meat market, an undertaker, physicians, blacksmith shops, a brick yard, cotton gin, flour mill, tannery, grist mill, a saloon and the toll gate. Thus, the town of College Grove had its beginnings in the middle 1800's.

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