First Gift Recorded

 On August 29, 1831, parish records note the first gift made to Christ Church. The donation was “part of a service of communion plate” from Mrs. Rebecca Symmes (or Sims). The gift included the first silver chalices used in communion services at Christ Church. This seems to have been the first time that the secretary of the Vestry recorded the name of a woman parishioner. Given the time and place, the story of these chalices and their donor inevitably intersects with the history of slavery in Middle Tennessee.

Rebecca was born in Pennsylvania in 1772. Her father was the well-known ship captain John Green, who piloted the first American merchant vessel to reach China in 1784. As a young woman, Rebecca married Walter Sims, an English-born merchant and ship captain who had crewed with her father. As Rebecca bore and raised five children, Walter developed into a wealthy Philadelphia merchant. He invested his profits in large tracts of land in several southern states, as well as mills and distilleries. 

Rebecca and Walter first established ties with Nashville in 1809, when two young men from that city, both medical students at the University of Pennsylvania, married young women in the Sims’ extended family and took them back to Tennessee. Dr. Boyd McNairy married Anna Maria Hodgkinson, a cousin of Rebecca, while Dr. John Shelby married Anna Maria Minnick, a niece of Capt. Sims. Both young men and their wives would go on to play leading roles in the early years of Christ Church.

Rebecca and Walter moved to Nashville with their children in 1818. Walter must have seen extraordinary promise in Nashville, then emerging as a bustling river port on the western frontier.  Like many wealthy transplants from northern states to the South in the antebellum period, the Sims family quickly acclimatized themselves to the lifestyle of elite Southern planters. For their home they acquired a farm in Davidson County that they called Woodland, as well as slaves to provide agricultural labor and household services.

Capt. Sims had little time to settle into this new life, for he died in 1820. His extensive land holdings in the Tennessee counties of Davidson, Bedford, Giles, and Hawkins, as well as property in the Philadelphia area, were either sold or divided among his wife and children. Walter bequeathed to his wife Rebecca “all my slaves to serve her during her natural life.” According to census records, in 1820, shortly after Walter’s death, she lived in the Nashville area with three family members and thirteen enslaved persons. Walter’s estate inventory, recorded at the Davidson county courthouse in 1822, lists twelve unnamed slaves who had been transferred to his wife Rebecca: three adult males, three adult females, and six children. Rebecca continued to manage the plantation over the years. In 1830, Rebecca Sims lived on the Woodland farm with one adult son, his wife, and one of their children. This small white family was supported by no fewer than seventeen enslaved persons. Judging by the gender and age ranges provided in the 1830 census data, the African American slaves likely comprised four or five families. 

The widow Rebecca Sims was probably among the small community of Episcopal worshipers in Nashville in the 1820s, but parish records do not mention her until the 1830s. Well supported by landed property and slave labor, Mrs. Sims was in a position to contribute financially to the success of the infant congregation. When church pews were offered for auction in July 1831, she was one of only two women, both widows, who purchased pew space to ensure privileged seating at Christ Church. And, as we have seen, in August 1831 she also made the gift of silver communion chalices. She remained an active communicant at Christ Church for more than twenty years, passing away in Shelbyville in 1849.

The lives and even the names of most of the Sims’ slaves are largely unknown to us, though we have a few clues. We know that one of them was a woman whose husband George belonged to a man named Michael Campbell. In September 1819, George ran away. Campbell placed an advertisement in Nashville newspapers offering a reward for George’s capture. As with many runaway slave ads, Campbell provided a physical description of George, noting his unusual height and facial scarring. Campbell specifically noted that George “has a wife at Capt. Sims’, about five miles from Nashville. He is expected to be in the neighborhood.” It is unknown whether George was ultimately recaptured, though he must have remained at large for at least a few months, as the newspaper notice kept appearing until early 1820. Perhaps George reunited with his wife and managed to escape to the north.

In Walter Sims’s will of 1819, he mentions “my Slave boy Jefferson which is now the property of my son William.” Given that William was only seven years old at the time, it may be that Jefferson was as much a playmate as a servant, though it is difficult to infer much about the nature of their relationship. When Rebecca Sims died thirty years later, she bequeathed to this same William “my slave by the name of big George.” Whether Big George was the same as the George who fled from Michael Campbell in 1819, we may never know.

Sources and further reading:

Sims, Jim. “Capt. Walter Sims, the Immigrant.” Ancestry.com, posted 31 December 2011.

Will of Rebecca Sims, written June 15, 1848, probated December 4, 1849. Tennessee, U.S., Wills and Probate Records, 1779-2008. Wilson County: Wills and Inventories, 1848-1863, pp. 153-154 (image 83 on microfilm).

Will of Walter Sims, written 20 February 1819, codicil 19 March 1819. Tennessee, U.S., Wills and Probate Records, 1779-2008. Davidson County: Wills, Vol. 7, 1816-1821, pp. 381-388 (images 220-224 on microfilm).

1820 U.S. Federal Census, record for Rebeccah Sims, Nashville, Davidson County, Tennessee

1830 U.S. Federal Census, record for Rebecca Sims, Davidson County, Tennessee