"And after Grant came," said Mrs. Billups, "we used to laugh as we
watched the Union sentries marching up and down that walk, right over
our plate."
* * * * *
Among the items not already mentioned, of which Columbus is proud, are
the facts that she has supplied two cabinet members within the past
decade--J.M. Dickinson, Taft's Secretary of War, and T.W. Gregory,
Wilson's Attorney General--and that J. Gano Johnson, breeder of famous
American saddle horses, has recently come from Kentucky and established
his Emerald Chief Stock Farm in Lowndes County, a short distance from
the town.
But items like these, let me be frank to say, do not appeal to me as do
the picturesque old stories which cling about such a town.
There is, for instance, the story of Alexander Keith McClung, famous
about the middle of the last century as a duellist and dandy. McClung
was a Virginian by birth, but while still a young man took up his
residence in Columbus. His father studied law under Thomas Jefferson and
was later conspicuous in Kentucky politics, and his mother was a sister
of Chief Justice John Marshall. In 1828, at the age of seventeen,
McClung became a midshipman in the navy, and though he remained in the
service but a year, he managed during that time to fight a duel with
another midshipman, who wounded him in the arm.
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