18 LIFE AND WORK OF DR. A. A. MURPHREE

 A number of these settled in Georgia. The famous Trion
cotton mills were founded by a descendant of this family.
Here factory thread is made, the warp for home-made woolen
clothing. Housewives used to buy it and weave it into cloth.
 Alabama had been admitted to the union a few years pre-
vious. The lands which comprised that rolling, red clay,
southern state, had been surveyed and were being put on sale
by the government. Only a small portion in the northeast
section of the state was being reserved for Cherokee Indians.
The rest was being homesteaded, and sold to settlers, many
of whom pushed down from the Carolinas, from Virginia,
and from Tennessee and Kentucky to the north.
 For the most part, the northern section of Alabama is
quite hilly. Old Lookout Mountain pushes down from Chat-
tanooga in a southwesterly direction to a point near Gads-
den, and forms the backbone of a whole series of small moun-
tains. Many of the hill people from the mountainous regions
in the north and east of Alabama, found this country to their
liking and homesteaded its sloping fields and forest country.
Like the pioneer settlers who blazed the trails in states all
over our nation as the settlements pushed westward, they
felled trees, built log houses and set up homes in this new
country.
 The land on which Ellis Murphree settled was located in
a small valley through which a small creek wound its way,
about twenty miles from Gadsden in Blount County, just two
miles from a village by the name of Chepultepec, which is
*bout forty miles north and a little east of Birmingham, a
city which did not exist then. He built a home and cabins
for his slaves. Through determination and acute business,
Ellis Murphree prospered.
 On November 8, 1838, a son was born whom Ellis Mur-
phree named Jesse Ellis. In all there were three boys and
seven daughters in the family, all raised to maturity.
 When Ellis Murphree settled near Chepultepec, the In-
dians were still a menace and had to be guarded against con-
tinually. The country was full of wild game, which furnished
a great deal of the food for the settlers.