[Illustration: HOUSE USED AS CAPITOL OF THE STATE OF FRANKLIN. In Greeneville, Tennessee. From a photograph taken in April, 1897.] I can not now notice the various sessions held by the assembly of Franklin. It met for the last time in Greeneville, in September, 1787. “During the years 1786 and 1787, a strange spectacle was presented--that of two empires being exercised at one and the same time, over one and the same territory and people.” County courts were held in the same counties, under the Franklin and the North Carolina governments; “the same militia was called out by officers appointed by each government; laws were passed by both assemblies”; taxes were laid by authority of both states--but the people said that they did not know which government had the right to receive their taxes, and therefore they adopted the easy solution of paying to neither. The Superior Courts of Franklin were held at Jonesboro; the courts under North Carolina were held at Davis’s on Buffalo creek, ten miles east of Jonesboro, and at Col. Tipton’s. There were now two strong parties, one under Tipton, adhering to North Carolina, and the friends of Franklin following Sevier, each of whom endeavored by every possible means to strengthen his cause. “Every provocation on the one side was surpassed in the way of retaliation by a still greater provocation on the other.... The clerks of the county courts of Washington, Greene and Sullivan, under Franklin, issued marriage licenses, and many persons were married by virtue of their authority.” In 1786, while a court was in session at Jonesboro, under the Franklin government, Col. John Tipton entered the court house with a party of men, took the records away from the clerk and drove the justices out of the house. Not long after this, Sevier entered the house where the North Carolina court was sitting, turned the justices out bodily and carried off the records. “The like acts were repeated several times during the existence of the Franklin government.” James Sevier was clerk of Washington county under the Franklin government, as he had been under North Carolina. Tipton went to Sevier’s house and took the old records away from him by force. Shortly afterward, the same records were recaptured, and James Sevier hid them in a cave. During these captures and removals many of the records were lost. Of the Franklin records all save one were either lost or destroyed. This single remaining record of the Franklin courts is not only interesting but amusing; and, to be as drunk as it unquestionably is, contains some law and a great deal of early history. This record was evidently made late at night, by the light of a “tallow dip” or a bear-oil lamp, with a bottle of well-distilled apple or peach brandy near by. It is the only written record relative to the “lost state” and its courts that I have ever been able to find. It is like an old-time copy-book. On the outside are the following entries and memoranda--I give them literally: