Terrell Milton Fielder
Terrell M. Fielder was born about 1822 in Newton County, Georgia. His parents were both born in North Carolina, as he told the census taker in 1880. Their names are not known.
He first appears in the 1850 census of Thomas County, in the far south of Georgia, as Terrel Fielder, twenty-eight, living in another family's household. On 6 October 1850 he married Susan Wilson in Thomas County, by licence and before a minister of the gospel. A son, Thomas, was born about 1852 and was most probably hers. Susan does not appear again, and she most probably died young. On 16 January 1853, in the same county, Terrel M. Fielder married Mary Rosina Barnes, a South Carolina girl of about nineteen.
They lived at first in Thomasville, the county seat. Their eldest son, Lucius, called Len, was born there on 25 January 1854, and James Marcus followed in 1857. In February 1859 the Thomasville paper told a story about him under the heading "A Panther." He had gone turkey hunting in the Ochlockonee swamp, sat down to call the birds, and turned to see a panther creeping toward him at twenty paces. He fired both barrels, and the animal fell and then got away into the swamp. He went home "very mad at having his turkey hunting thus interfered with."
By 1860 the family had moved east into Brooks County, where the census lists him as forty, with Mary R., Thomas, Lucius, James and the baby Milton. Brooks County had been formed in 1858, with its seat at Quitman. In the summer of 1864 he was a private in Company E of Simons' Battalion, Georgia Reserves, the Brooks County company of Capt. Angus Morrison. The reserves were raised that year from boys too young and men too old for the regular army. A history of Morven says the company went by rail from Thomasville to the coast below Savannah. Its regiment was part of the garrison of Fort McAllister when Sherman's army took the fort in December 1864. Whether he was still with the company then is not known.
His son Terrell Elmer was born at Quitman on 9 January 1865, in the last months of the war. Ella Mae, Mary Elizabeth and Maggie followed. In 1871 he was an officer of the Sons of Temperance at Quitman. He worked with his hands. In August 1875 the Quitman Reporter said that "Uncle Terrible" Fielder was fitting up a dry goods store, and that it would be one of the handsomest in town. In December the same paper reported that he had broken his arm when a scaffold fell where he was working.
Soon after that the family came apart. By June 1880 Mary Rosina was at Lake City, Florida, with five of the children, keeping house as a dressmaker and calling herself a widow. Terrell was alive. The same census found him in Gadsden County, Florida, at Sycamore, west of Tallahassee, working as a wheelwright. With him were a wife, Margarett, aged twenty, two small sons, Jimmie and Alfano, both born in Georgia, and his son Terrell, fifteen. The ages of the little boys put the new household back to about 1876.
He died on 5 or 6 April 1887 and was buried at Sneads, in Jackson County, the next county west of Gadsden. He was about sixty-five. Margaret, born in June 1859, outlived him by fifty years and was buried beside him in 1937 under a double stone headed FIELDER. His part of it reads "TERRELL M. / BORN ABOUT 1840 / APR. 5, 1887," a guess at his age that missed by almost twenty years. His grave now also has a granite government marker for Confederate service: "TERRELL MILTON FIELDER / PVT CO E 1 GA RESERVES / CONFEDERATE STATES ARMY / 1840 / APR 6 1887." Mary Rosina lived until 1897 and was buried at Lake City under a stone that still calls her "Wife of T.M. Fielder."
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Cite: Heirology, "Terrell Milton Fielder (1822-1887)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/terrell-milton-fielder-1822-1887-c0b6bc.