9

His father offered him a portion of his 100,000 acres in middle
Tennessee and John Devereux insisted that his daughter accept what
slaves they needed. A small city was moved over the mountains in
the next few months, the young couple living with brother Lucius
Polk until Ashwood Hall was built. This mansion, with its 100-acre
lawn and imported trees, reached its zenith after Leonidas sold it
to his brother Andrew in 1841. By the time it burned in 1874 it
had become known as the peer of any ante-bellum home in the South.
{side note: McMinnville Land Grant}

In Tennessee, Polk came under the influence of its first bishop,
a fellow alumnus of Chapel Hill, James Hervey Otey, [Bedford County, VA] who, though he
had been a priest in the diocese for six years was actually elected
bishop the same year Polk came. Clergy were scarce on the frontier
and Otey was glad to have a self-supporting minister and equally
pleased that the newcomer was influential, capable, and dedicated.
Polk took St. Peter's Church, Columbia, and himself built on the
Polk plantation a few miles away the architectural gem St. John's,
Ashwood, which still stands and in whose churchyard Otey is buried.

Polk and Otey became closest friends. They joined in opening
the Columbia Female Institute which lasted nearly a century. They
nearly started a college at Madison, near Nashville, in 1837 but a
financial panic intervened. At the historic general convention of
1838, from which many feel the missionary outreach of the modern
Episcopal church had its beginning, Otey nominated his own ablest
clergyman for the episcopate of an area bigger than France, and