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YEARS OF HISTORICAL COLLECTING PRODUCES A MUSEUM
 John E. Turner displays Tennessee pottery that includes a salt crock that was used by his family years ago. |
By Glenda Dyer
Eagleville businessman John Edward Turner has been collecting historical objects for most of his 75 years.
He started out with a bullet mold that he acquired when he was in the second grade at Eagleville school. Before he finished collecting bullet molds, he had an assortment of about 800 of them, including ones from the Revolutionary and Civil War eras.
As he has done many times, he sold that collection and put the proceeds into other items that attracted his interest.
Fortunately for those interested in the past, Turner assembled his collections into a local museum about eight years ago. His 40 by 100-foot, climate-controlled facility is located within his mini-storage complex, which sits on U.S. 41-A on the south end of Eagleville.
The museum is open by appointment and admission is free. A tour can be scheduled by calling Turner at 274-3833 or 274-6358. School groups are among those who visit his facility.
"I try to tell the kids when they come through here that when they are young they need to be interested in hunting, fishing, trapping, collecting marbles or doing something or anything," he said. "There are so many people who are not interested in anything."
Turner was born in 1932 in the Rocky Glade community where his father had a dairy farm. He started milking cows when he was 14 and stayed in the dairy business until he was about 66.
"I never did anything but farm," he said. His crops included soybeans, corn, oats, wheat and black Laredo hay beans. At one time he was milking 110 to 115 cows and farming 600 to 700 acres of land.
Before he got out of the farming business, he and his wife, the former Judy Read, bought and restored the Chesley Williams house on U.S. 41-A on the south end of Eagleville.
The restoration took almost four years. The Turners then lived in the house about 15 or so years until they built a more modern home across the highway from the historic one.
Much of Turner’s collection centers on farm equipment and implements that he or his father and brothers would have used during their times on the farm.
"I have always been interested in antique tractors, antique pedal cars and truly just any kind of junk," Turner said. "I mainly farmed all my life with tractors that were not too modern and was raised up with mules, H’s and M’s, 560s and 806s."
Turner restored his old tractors and other equipment with the help of local mechanic Jimmy Lamb, and all of the equipment has been brought up to running condition.
In his collection are three tractors that he used when he farmed. One is an Empire tractor which was made after World War II with mostly Jeep parts. At one time Turner had eight Empire tractors which provided him enough parts to make four working tractors.
Another of the tractors on display is a Farmall H that he and his brother bought two years before Turner married, which would make it 55 years old.
Turner started collecting miniature pedal tractors while he was still in the dairy business. He now has about 100 pedal tractors and cars displayed.
"I would just buy the ones that needed to be worked on," he said. "They were real cheap then."
Among Turner’s other interests are cannons. He first made a cannon using a set of wagon wheels and a wooden object that resembled a cannon barrel that was found under a house in Nashville.
"I set it up on the porch and everybody thought I had a real cannon," he said. He then progressed to making real cannons and now has nine of them in his museum.
Turner has the barrels of the real cannons poured in a foundry. The barrels come back rough from the foundry, though, and it takes many hours of work to make them smooth. The Mennonites make the cannon wheels.
Two of his cannons have bronze barrels and are like the ones the Confederate soldiers used at Shiloh. He has shown or fired his cannons in Civil War reenactments and for other events.
Turner’s grandfather, Andrew David Turner, fought in the Confederacy under Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest and was among Forrest’s troops who surrendered at Citronelle, Ala., at the end of the war. He has among his collection a blue salt crock that belonged to his grandparents.
He also has a significant collection of whiskey jugs, including about 20 Jack Daniel jugs, which are collected worldwide.
"These jugs are over 100 years old and are very rare," he said.
Turner also has other liquor jugs, including ones from Shelbyville, Chattanooga, Nashville and other places. Some of the brown jugs in his collection are known as scratch jugs, because the company name is scratched into the pottery rather than stenciled on it.
Among the many items in his museum are pieces of Eagleville memorabilia, including a Regulator clock from the old drug store.
He also has a hot air fan that burns alcohol and a vault from the old Eagleville bank. Turner has a story to tell about the vault and about most of the other objects in his museum.
"I remember stopping at the bank when I was 13 or 14 years old and having to wait in the mornings for the vault, which had a time clock on it, to open up so you could get money out of it," he said.
Mrs. David Ivy, who worked at the bank, was not at work one day and the other employees could not get the vault open.
"When banker Marvin Hayes bought the bank, he wanted (the vault) out of there," Turner said.
Among the objects of iron, wood and steel are three porcelain Frozen Charlie dolls.
The dolls were manufactured as early as 1850 and were originally produced as Victorian bathing dolls called Frozen Charlottes. As the story goes, the dolls were named for a Victorian era girl who went dancing with her boyfriend Charlie to a ball at a nearby inn. She left without her wrap against her mother’s wishes and froze in the snow.
The story goes on to say that Charlie soon died of a broken heart, and the two sweethearts now slumber forever in a single tomb.
Turner also has a small toy horse hitched to a carriage that his father gave to his late sister, Robbie, plus an arrowhead collection on display that she had used in her teaching.
Turner says he currently has enough objects for his museum and is trying to keep from collecting more but people still make him offers.
"They soon found out that if they had something they didn’t want they would just send it to John Turner, and he would send them a check," he said. "I still have a lot of that happening."