Martha Bush Kennon
daughter ofThomas Bush & Elizabeth Few Lee Bush

There is no known biography of the woman who was born after 1790 to young Elizabeth Few Lee Andrew, who as a widow since 1784 had married first married Revolutionary War veteran Benjamin Andrew, a man later described by Elizabeth's nephew as having been "many, many" years older than Elizabeth. After he died, Elizabeth married Thomas Bush, by whom she had Martha. Martha was born to a full house, with stepbrothers Moses Andrew and two older stepbrothers, William and John Lee. William Lee had been around 10 when his father died;John, around 8. Elizabeth Few Lee Andrew Bush was described as having been a devout Methodist since around 1800 when traveling preachers of that faith "first crossed the Savannah River." Daughter Martha married a man whose life would be given to the Methodist religion as one of the founders  of the church in Tuscaloosa, Robert Kennon.

There is also a reference to her half-brother, Moses Andrew, a doctor who was also a Methodist minister in Montgomery, Alabama.

"The pleasant area in which Tuscaloosa is set was filled with danger for white settlers in years when other parts of Alabama were beginning to attract pioneers from the Old South. It was one of the last of the Indian strongholds to be cleared of peril in the days following the Creek War. It was not entirely open until the
Cherokees below the Tennessee River and the Chickasaws and Choctaws west and South of the Black Warrior River ceded their lands to the United States in 1816.

    Prior to the close of the Indian Wars in 1814, Alabama pioneers had followed two main routes; the Old Federal Road from Georgia, or the Huntsville Trail from Tennessee. Establishment of the first of these roads became possible after the Ellicott Line was drawn in 1799 to mark the boundary between the United States and Spanish West Florida. Fort Stoddert was then quickly built and St. Stephens became an American military outpost. In 1811, with the consent of the chiefs of the Creek Nation, United States engineers were able to cut a rough road through the wilderness from Fort Mitchell on the Chatahoochee River to Mims' Ferry on the Alabama. It was hardly better than the old Indian Trail it followed, but an ever-increasing number of adventurous souls traversed it bravely in the years than ensued.

According to Dr. Anson West: This Indian trail went by Fort Mitchell, on the Chattahoochee River, nine miles below Columbus, though Fort Mitchell was not there then, and by what is known as Warrior Stand, and eight miles south of the present city of Montgomery, and by a place called Burnt Corn in Conecuh County....As the savages were still owners and occupants of this wilderness country from side to side, the cutting out of the road did not remove the perils of the route, but only made the way easier found and followed.

  The Huntsville Road also followed an Indian trail whose twists and turns were determined by the very contours of the North Alabama rivers and ridges. Very few white settlers ventured far along it prior to 1814, and those who did met hardships often beyond even their dauntless courage. Writing of Dr. John Ford and his party, who tried to settle near Huntsville in 1807, Dr. West says:

Civilization, even in its smallest beginnings and rudest forms, had not so much as laid a preemption on that soil. The little tract of land, though released from Indian claims, was closely environed by savages. While it was the center of a beautiful region, with gushing springs, refreshing streams, and fertile soil, it was nevertheless at the time, an inhospitable land. It was a dismal solitude. There was nothing to gratify a reasonable ambition, nothing to encourage religious devotion, or to contribute to religious environment.

  Small wonder that Ford and his party;, "oppressed by isolation, harrassed by depradation, and thirsting for better religious facilities, gave up the struggle and went on to "the Natchez country."

    Thus it was that the earliest waves of settlement by-passed the Tuscaloosa area, leaving the Indians in as full possession as they had been in 1707 when French explorers located "Taskaloussas on the map they drew for the King of France. For most of this period, the region between the Black Warrior River and the ridge separating it form the Alabama River appears to have been neutral territory, a buffer state between the lands of the Choctaws and the lands of the Creeks. About 1800, however, the Creeks, with permission of their neighbors, moved into build at the Falls of the Black Warrior a town which stood until it was burned by General Coffee in 1812.

  Tandy Walker, blacksmith, Virginian, and pioneer in the St. Stephens region by 1801, visited Black Warrior Town in 1812. He went there on an errand of mercy, to ransom and rescue on Mr. Crawley, captured by a party of Creeks as they returned through Tennessee from an excursion with Tecumseh to the Great Lakes. Walker's knowledge of the Indian languages stood him in good stead. He rescued Mrs. Crawley, but left no record of his negotiations with her captors or of the town in which the negotiations. He is recognized as one of the founders of Coffeeville, Clarke County, where he died in 1842. Although he seems never to have joined the church himself, his wife Mary and daughter Sarah Newstep Reynolds were both staunch Methodists. It seems probable the Walker home was one of those in which itinerant preachers of the Methodist faith found warm hospitality as they rode their circuits.

    To such intinerant missionairies the Old Federal Road and the Huntsville Road were the early arteries of travel. Most of them came on their missionairy journies bearing credentials from the South Carolina Conference...

    Among the group of clergymen who came to Tuscaloosa that winter of 1818-1819. only Rev. Robert Lewis Kennon maintained a Conference Connection after he moved to Alabama. It is interesting that, like Dr. Owen and Dr. Meed (and brother-in-law Moses Andrew.) he also combined preaching with the practice of medicine. Ministry to souls and bodies when hand-in-hand, it seems, in many a frontier community. (Sandra Taylor note: Another brother-in-law, William Lee, was a doctor. Another member of Kennon's family in Alabama was his wife's cousin-by-marriage, William Devereux, who came around this time to the area which shortly because Covington County. Devereux was to be called "father" of Covington County. Kennon's mother-in-law Elizabeth Few Lee Andrew Bush would move to Alabama and die in Montgomery, home of Moses Andrew, in 1829. And many Lee descendants of John Lee of Fairfield Co S.C, including Greenberry Marshall descendants, would populate Monroe County. In 2,000 A.D. one of these descendants is former State Sen. Ann Smith Bedsole.)

   Born in Granville County, N.C., in 1789, converted to the Methodist faith when he was eleven years old, the church was his natural calling. The South Carolina Conference admitted him on trial in 1808, elected him deacon in 1810, and and ordained him elder in 1812. Ill health brought his itinerancy to a close, and turned his energies and interests toward the study of medicine (Note from Sandra Taylor: Did he also turn to medicine after marrying the sister of Drs. William Lee and Moses Andrew?)