David Purviance was co-founder with Barton Stone of the Christian Church which later divided itself, as church congregations will, into the Christian Church/Disciples of Christ and the Church of Christ.

Purviance Family

John Purviance, son of the Huguenot-Northern Irish immigrants John and Margaret (McKnight) Purviance, was born in 1743, either in Lancaster Co., Pennsylvania, or in Castle Finn, Ireland; it is not known whether the date of immigration to the colonies was 1742 or 1743. In 1764 John Purviance married Mary Jane Wasson in Rowan Co., NC. Mary Jane Wasson Purviance died in 1810 in Wilson Co., Middle Tennessee, Tenn. Their second son, another John Purviance, father of Martha Purviance (Mrs. Peter Fleming), was scalped by "Indians" in Sumner County, Tennessee, in the Nashville vicinity, leaving a young widow who later married a William McCorkle, kinsman of the McCorkles were moved around 1830 to settle the Western District. These Purviances were Presbyterians.

"Elder" David Purviance and the Church of Christ/Christian Church

One of the children of John and Margaret Purviance was "Elder" David Purviance. In the early 19th century, Presbyterians and some Baptists sought reform of, mostly, the Presbyterian Church by returning to only the words of the New Testament, ignoring centuries of ecclesiastical organization, practice and convention, interpretation, and in their view the fallacious engrafting of human ideas onto the Gospel as it had been written down. Discussions of natural justice and canon law, they thought, were not only erroneous but beside the point. In approximately 1792, John and Margaret Purviance escaped Middle Tennessee after their second son (another John) had been killed by indigenous peoples, retreating to Cane Ridge, Bourbon County, Kentucky. In 1797 their son David Purviance was elected to the Kentucky Legislature where he fought John Breckinridge's re-establishment of a state church and opposed slavery, advocating gradual emancipation.

David Purviance was co-pastor with Barton Stone of the Congregation of Cane Ridge and Concord in the Springfield Presbytery. Persuaded by the camp-meeting "New Light" fervor of the early 19th-century frontier, at the Cane Ridge Meeting House in Kentucky, he and Stone renounced "man-made" creeds and signed the Last Will and Testament of their presbytery, forming a new church. David Purviance was the first to be baptized, by immersion, into the new doctrine. Barton Stone remained in Kentucky and David Purviance spread their beliefs to Ohio, where he died in 1847 in New Paris, Preble County. Always an opponent of slavery, he participated in the founding of Miami University of Oxford, Ohio, and acted as its president pro tempore as needed.

The ten siblings of David Purviance include two known Dyer County, Tennessee, immigrants, however shortly Anne Purviance (Woods) may have lingered in Dyer County:

Anne Purviance (Mrs. Samuel Woods), born 3 Feb. 1774, lived in Middle Tenn., Montgomery Co., Ky.; Giles Co., TN; in 1820 to Dyer County, Tennessee; died 17 August 1858 in Benton, Arkansas. Children: John Purviance Woods (b. 1797); Margaret Woods, 1800-21, never married; Mary Woods (Mrs. John Kellough)(1802-1832); David Milton Woods, b. 1805, married 1825 Eliz. Kelsey Copeland, one child: Nancy Matilda (Nancy Matilda Woods, born 1823, died Benton, Ark., 1883, married Alexander Gillespie Gamble, who died in Benton, Ark, in 1878); and

Elizabeth H. Purviance (Mrs. William Thomas), born 12 May 1765 in Rowan Co., NC, died Dec. 1849 in Dyer Co., Tennessee. In 1791, Elizabeth H. Purviance married William Thomas, born 1765, died in Dyer Co., Tennessee, 1 April 1833. This Elizabeth H. Purviance (Thomas) is the ancestor of many Dyer/Gibson county descendants. For example, she is the grandmother of Hiram McCorkle and therefore ancestor of Hiram's progeny of Newbern, including Eddie Sue (Suzy) Smith Dunavant and Betty Jane Atkins Caldwell; the great-great grandmother of Maury Adolphus Huie, 1895-1972, and of Maury's double-first cousin Howard EWING Huie, 1907-1971); she is the great-great grandmother of Julia McCorkle Montgomery of Newbern, and g-g-g grandmother of Julia's daughter Tanya Messer Sandlin of Newbern; she is the great-great grandmother of Sophie Huie Cashdollar of Dyersburg (mother of Hunter Huie Cashdollar and Jessica Huie Cashdollar) and of Marsha Cope Huie, your compiler. She is the g-g-g greatgrandmother of Jennifer Huie Tucker, Jos. Headden Huie, attorney, and John Ewing Huie, all three originally of Newbern.

The children of Elizabeth H. Purviance and William Thomas:

a. Jane Maxwell Thomas, 1802-1855 (Mrs. Edwin Alexander McCorkle), who is buried with her husband in McCorkle Cemetery, Dyer County. Edwin A. McCorkle was born in 1799 in Rowan County, NC., and his parents are buried in the Thyatira Presbyterian Cemetery in Rowan Co., NC. Before coming to Dyer County, Jane and Edwin McCorkle lived around Murphreesborough, Tennessee. (That's how Edwin A. McCorkle's brother, Robert Andrew Hope McCorkle, spelled his former home of Murfreesboro in correspondence written from Newbern during the Civil War, a correspondence well worth reading.)

b. John Purviance Thomas, 1792-1857, some of whose children remained in West Tennessee.

c. David Thomas, Dec. 10, 1795- died 1836, first attorney general ad interim and secretary of war for the Republic of Texas. David Thomas signed the Texas Declaration of Independence beside the name of Sam Houston, each listing himself as from Refugio, Texas. It is known that the McCorkle and Houston families had early been friends and fellow landowners in the colony of Virginia; it is presumed they traveled together to North Carolina, thence to Tennessee. Your compiler (Marsha Cope Huie) possesses in 2003 a quilt lovingly made for David Thomas by his Tennessee family which the State of Texas would want and which in truth should be in its Archives. David Thomas, whose sisters were in Dyer County, was injured by a musket ball in the "Runaway Scrape" escaping the advance of Santa Ana's Mexican army towards San Jacinto. An archivist in Austin, Texas, at the state capitol told me one can watch David Thomas' handwriting as secretary of war become increasingly scrawled as the Mexican army advanced. David Thomas was to die in the De Zavala home from his wound and is buried in a hero's grave in the San Jacinto Memorial grounds near Houston, in the De Zavala Cemetery. The major part of the writing of the Texas Constitution is attributed to David Thomas, brother of at least two Dyer County residents, Mrs. Woods and Mrs. McCorkle.