The homeplace
Where the family comes from
Long before it was "the reunion grounds," the land near Odenville was simply home — the farm where Samuel James "Jim" Tucker (1871–1960) and his wife Fannie Lou Mewbourne (1882–1952) raised eleven children in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Jim's father, Samuel Johnson Tucker (1827–1907), a Confederate veteran, is buried a short walk away at Friendship Baptist Church, and Fannie Lou's people, the Mewbournes, had come west from Elbert County, Georgia to settle in St. Clair County.
That maiden name mattered. Carried forward as a given name in the Southern custom, "Mewbourne" became "Mewbern" — the thread that still ties the family's stories back to this one farm.
Eleven children were born on this land between 1900 and 1925. The family that gathered here for decades is their descendants.
When their parents were gone, the eleven siblings held the combined homeplace together. In 1996 they organized it formally — The Tucker Foundation, Inc., chartered in Alabama for the stated purpose of genealogical research — and in 1997 the acreage was deeded into it so the whole family could keep using the place their parents built. For nearly thirty years the Foundation carried the property taxes and hosted the reunion that brought everyone back to Odenville.
Before Odenville
The Carolina roots — and the 1850 land grant
The family's story on this ground reaches back further than Jim. His grandfather, Joseph Russell Tucker (1804–1863), was born in South Carolina and came west on the same Carolina-to-Alabama migration that opened St. Clair County after the Creek War. He died here, at the place remembered as "the Tucker Place, St. Clair Springs," and his son Samuel Johnson Tucker (1827–1907) — a Confederate veteran of the 58th Alabama Infantry, buried at Friendship Baptist — raised the next generation on this land.
How far back does the family's claim to this exact corner go? To 1850 — and it was Joseph Russell himself who signed for it. The federal land patents record Joseph Russell Tucker receiving a United States land grant on April 1, 1850 for land in Section 2, Township 15-South, Range 2-East — the Highway 174 corner the homeplace still sits on. The 1850 census confirms it: a Joseph Tucker in St. Clair County, born about 1804 in South Carolina, living with his wife Rachel — the progenitor and Rachel Thrasher exactly. He and his sons kept adding to the block, with more Tucker patents in Sections 1 and 2 by 1858. The Tuckers have held this ground, straight from the government, for more than 170 years.
The long story of this land — Creek homeland, the opening of the frontier, the 1850 grant, and how our family came to hold it — now has its own page. Read “This ground, older than all of us” →