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last spring. I am pleased to State however that the services
of an other gentleman have been procured, who has been
recently employed in making a survey of the Such, Boiling
Pot and Tumbling Shoals of Tennessee river; and it is thought
that he will also be able to make an examination of
Harpeth Shoals on Cumberland river, in time for all
his reports to be laid before your body, at the present session.
Those two rivers being the principal outlets to the produce
of East and middle Tennessee, the removal of obstructions
in them, would seem to be entititled to your first attention
In compliance with the act of the last Session-
authorizing the building of a Penitentiary, the commissioners
who were appointed to superintend the erection of a
suitable edifice, entered upon the duties assigned to
them immediately after the adjournment of the Legislature
in January eighteen hundred and thirty. That they might
avail themselvs of all the experience improvements which
experience had made manifest, plans of the best
constructed Eastern Penitentiaries were procured
by an agent sent specially for that purpose. A site
was obtained upon which to erect the buildings a
mile south west of the court house in Nashville
uniting more advantages than any other which
could be had in the vicinity. At the commensement [sic]
of the work a question of some delicacy presented itself
for the consideration of the commissioners, whether
it should be upon a plan that could be finished
for the amount appropriated, or so extensive that it would
answer the purposes of the State for a long period to
come, without their [sic] being a necesity of making