Antique 1895 Tennessee Supreme Court Writ of Fieri Facias 📜 Goodpasture-Signed, Nashville, Davidson County, Lanier v. Turner No. 17030

What Was a Writ of Fieri Facias? 📜 A Nashville Courthouse Errand, 1895

Size: 14" x 8 1/2" ~ complete and legible, with its original folds, even toning across the paper, and some foxing on the folded panels.

This is a writ of fieri facias out of the Supreme Court of Tennessee at Nashville — lawyers shortened the Latin to "fi. fa.," and what it means in plain English is: a judgment has been won, now go collect it. This one, Case No. 17030, is Lula Anna Lee Lanier and others against James Turner and others, and it orders the Sheriff of Davidson County, Tennessee, to make $24.80 in costs out of the goods of James Turner, William Turner, and S.A. Lanier. The underlying case had gone up on appeal from the Davidson County Chancery Court. One thing I'll point out because the paper itself points it out: Lanier is a name on both sides of this caption, plaintiffs and defendants alike.

🖋️ The Dates in the Clerk's Own Hand

The writ is witnessed to the first Monday of the December 1894 term, carries a judgment dated the 8th of February, 1895, and down on the docket panel, in pencil, somebody noted it was "Sent Turner Bros. Apl 11/95" — the 11th of April, 1895. Follow that chain and you're watching the paper actually work: a February judgment, still moving through the county two months later. It was struck on a form from the Brandon Printing Company of Nashville, a Nashville printer that turned out official Tennessee state printing in the 1890s — BRANDON PRINT sits printed right at the foot of the docket panel.

✍️ One Goodpasture Signing in Another's Office

The witness line names Albert Virgil Goodpasture, Clerk of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, and the writ is actually signed "By W.H. Goodpasture, D.C." — his deputy. A.V. Goodpasture held the clerkship from 1891 to 1897, and his brother was William H. Goodpasture - same surname, same initials, signing in his office. After A.V.'s term ended, the two of them opened the Goodpasture Book Company in downtown Nashville and ran it together from 1897 to 1914 — a shop that was more a club for book lovers than a bookstore. A.V. went on to co-write the school textbook History of Tennessee with William R. Garrett, professor of American history and dean at the Peabody Normal College in Nashville, a book sponsored by the state textbook commission under Governor Benton McMillin. Garrett had edited the American Historical Magazine since it started in 1896; A.V. later edited that same magazine, and he served as secretary of the Tennessee Historical Society. Here's the part I love: the first edition of that textbook came out in 1900 from the Brandon Printing Company of Nashville, the same shop whose BRANDON PRINT sits on this writ, and its title page calls him "Formerly Clerk of the Supreme Court of Tennessee." He spent his career keeping Tennessee's history. This is a small, ordinary piece of paper that came straight out of his own office.

⚖️ The Fee Line That Stopped Me

Turn to the bill of costs and one line reads "Clerk & Master G.K. Whitworth" — George K. Whitworth, who ran the Davidson County Chancery clerk's office for Chancellor Andrew Allison. In November 1894 Allison announced he would replace Whitworth with his own son, Granville. On the 14th, Whitworth shot Allison dead with a shotgun in a corridor of the Nashville courthouse, then shot himself; Allison died that day, and Whitworth eight days later. Allison himself was no minor figure — vice-president of the Harvard Law School alumni association, on the American Bar Association's executive committee, and a Confederate veteran who had served under Stonewall Jackson. This writ is witnessed to the very next term of court, weeks after the shooting, and it still carries Whitworth's fees from when the case sat in his chancery court. All of it sits in one line of a fee bill.

💵 A Roster in a $24.80 Bill

The rest of the itemized bill is a small roster of a working Davidson County courthouse: sheriff's fees to W.J. Sullivan, Andrew Milam, W.P. Moore, and McCampbell, a notary's fee to Firman Smith, an injunction or two along the way ("inj," "injs" in the clerk's own shorthand), and two "non est." returns at 25 cents apiece — the sheriffs' own notes that a party couldn't be found to serve. Total due, itemized right down to the quarter: $24.80. There's a second, printed Bill of Costs schedule on the same sheet, for the Supreme Court's own fees, with its State Tax column filled in below it.

That notary, Firman Smith, whose fee on this bill was a quarter, was Charles Firman Smith, a Nashville lawyer who had come up from Mississippi, where he was first honor man and valedictorian of his class at the University of Mississippi in 1887. John A. Pitts, who went into partnership with him as Pitts and Smith from 1901 to 1905, called him "a most courtly gentleman." And my favorite bit: in 1897 the Nashville American ran a Tennessee history prize contest, a hundred figures from the state's past to identify, and Garrett's American Historical Magazine reprinted the winners. Firman Smith got 95 right and took home $15. A.V. Goodpasture, the clerk named on this very writ, got 93 and had to settle for three months of the newspaper.

This exact writ — the folds, the toning, the foxing on the panels — is the one in every photograph here. What you see is what ships.