Extended Leake reunion reaches across time

By Erin Sullivan for the Commercial Appeal
June 6, 2004

An old man points a pale finger at a younger man in the yard. He motions for him to come to where he's sitting in a chair underneath a willow oak tree more than a hundred years old, on ground where Civil War soldiers spilled their blood and their amputated limbs were buried.

The old man's family used to live there once, in the white antebellum home a hundred yards from his chair in the shade, on a knoll near the Wolf River in Collierville. He has folders and albums spilling across his lap, copies of newspaper clippings. Obituaries. Photographs. He shuffles them looking for dates and names, for information telling him how the hundreds of people milling around are related to him. His voice is a low rumbling whisper.

"Come here," Richard Thomas, 89, said to the younger man. "Read this."

It was a saying he found and liked. He made copies and brought it to the reunion.

"Family is at the center of life's meaning," read John Leake, 57. He read the rest of it, then handed it back to Thomas.

"That's true," Leake said.

More than 150 years ago, a doctor and state senator named Virginius Leake moved his family into the plantation home named Greenlevel. On Saturday, his ancestors gathered for the first Leake reunion in memory.

The home is on the National Register of Historic Places and is now owned by state Sen. Mark Norris, who lives at Greenlevel with his wife and two children. It was built in the late 1820s by Judge John Overton, famous for helping establish the city of Memphis. Overton died in 1833 and probably never saw the completion of Greenlevel. Overton's daughter, Ann, and her husband, Robert Brinkley (who built The Peabody hotel), inherited Greenlevel. In 1844, they sold it to Bennett Bagby and his wife, Frances Leake Lewis. They tried to turn the home into an inn, but flooding of the Wolf River foiled their plans. In 1850, they sold it to Frances's brother, Virginius Leake.

Virginius and his wife, Martha Anderson Feild had five children - Elgin, Millard, Tingnal, Nellie and Mary. Virginius Leake was a prominent doctor. After the Battle of Shiloh, he treated the wounded. The upstairs hallway was used for surgery. There are still bloodstains on the poplar floor.

"There are buried feet and arms and legs from that battle," John Leake said Saturday in the backyard. "Probably right where you're standing."

John Leake is an architect in Collierville and the main historian of the Leake family. He organized the reunion, sending out 100 letters to family members he could locate.

"It seems like each generation has one person interested in family history," he said. "And that happened to fall on me."

Family legend says Virginius died of a broken heart. His daughter, Mary, died of pneumonia when she was 14. Virginius, being a doctor, was distraught he couldn't save her. In 1873, he died of a heart attack in Nashville, six months into his term as a state senator.

The home was kept in the Leake family until the 1960s, although it was abandoned for years before being sold. Two of the columns out front were lying on the ground. It appeared renters had used some of the home for firewood. There was no electricity or plumbing. The Barzizza family restored it, then sold it to the Cottam family in 1986. Norris bought it in 1993.

"Isn't this beautiful," Norris said Saturday, as the Leakes gathered on the front porch for family pictures. A few weeks after buying Greenlevel, the first person showed up in his driveway, saying a relative was born there. The visitors - from Oregon, California, Florida, Virginia - would show up every few months. Soon, Norris began getting them in touch with John Leake.

One of John Leake's wishes was to find the ancestors of Millard Leake (one of Virginius's sons, who seemed to disappear from the family). He found one on Friday.

"I'm overwhelmed," said Phil Pierini, 75, grandson of Millard Leake, who lives in Whitehaven and came after getting a call from John Leake. His grandfather died young. "All they ever told us was that he was a redheaded Methodist minister."

He wiped his eyes - the same light blue-green as most of the other 200 or so people at Greenlevel.

"I can't express what is going on here. For 75 years, I knew nothing," Pierini said. "And now all this exists."

The reunion continues today, with tours of cemeteries where ancestors are buried.

"Something that is a major problem with America today is the loss of family, the loss of roots," said John Leake, the great-grandson of Tingnal Leake. "And that's very sad."