A view of Memphis during the mid-1800s.
Marcus Winchester, the first mayor of Memphis, would turn 250 years old on May 28, 2026. Winchester is the subject of a new biography by Memphis-born author R. Scott Williams, whose Townmania: Marcus Winchester and the Making of Memphis aims to shed light on this often-overshadowed historical figure.
Winchester was integral to the early days of Memphis, when it was little more than a trading post on the Mississippi River. He opened the first store here and was the first real estate agent in town. He also started the first bank in Memphis and served as the city’s postmaster for longer than he did as mayor. So why is Winchester more footnote than historical headline? That question is exactly what Williams set out to answer in his fourth and newest book.
Tennessee Roots
R. Scott Williams
Williams grew up hearing stories told by his grandparents, learning about the people who came before him. Both sides of his family had deep roots in rural Haywood County, Tennessee, where Williams was a self-described “goofy kid” who would ask family members to recount family lore for his squeaking tape recorder or, eventually, video camera. His paternal grandmother kept a box of photographs on top of a cabinet and would take them down and tell him stories about the past.
“Her stories were filled with all types of murder, sin, and excitement, so she probably gets most of the credit for instilling a love of storytelling and history in me,” Williams remembers with a laugh.
Both sides of Williams’ family settled in Haywood County in 1833, and there they would remain until Williams’ parents married and moved to Memphis. “I was born in the old Baptist Hospital, the one where Elvis died, and then my parents took me home to our house on Spottswood, by the University of Memphis.”
Williams is a graduate of the journalism program at the University of Memphis, and he has worked with a series of advertising agencies. He eventually worked for Elvis Presley Enterprises, and his years with Graceland only deepened his love for history. Williams is now the CEO of Discovery Park of America in Union City, Tennessee.
When the internet was brand-new, Williams dutifully entered his family records into ancestry.com.
“It was a fairly easy family genealogy to research because they were all right there in the same neighborhood,” Williams says.
Some of the street names have changed, but the downtown area of our city still follows the general plan originally laid out in the early 1800s.
He started a blog about what he calls his “ancestry adventures,” which caught the eye of the History Press. They made Williams an offer to publish a biography of explorer Richard Halliburton, an adventure writer who paid for his travels by publishing stories about them in national magazines in the 1920s and ’30s. Williams jumped at the chance, discovering a meeting-point for his passions for history and journalism in the art of biography. He would also later pen biographies of New York entertainment columnist Oscar “Odd” McIntyre and noted frontiersman and United States Congressman David Crockett.
“The character and the brand he created gobbled him up and became the thing people remember,” Williams says of Crockett. “A lot of fascinating things he did orchestrated what became the cartoon of ‘Davy Crockett.’ I got a lot of pushback from the rest of Tennessee because I called it The Accidental Fame and Lack of Fortune of West Tennessee’s David Crockett. Of course, the East Tennessee people just went bananas. ‘He’s from East Tennessee!’” Williams says in a voice dripping with mock-outrage. “I tried to explain that for all of his adult life, he was here in West Tennessee and he was our congressman.”
Even after his rise and fall in Memphis, there is much more to Winchester’s story, and it’s all rivetingly told in Townmania, from his land deals in Hopefield, Arkansas, to the succession of developments that replaced the cemetery where he was buried in Memphis in 1856.
Williams may sound somewhat possessive of Crockett, but that is simply a factor of the way he selects the subjects for his biographical work. It takes him between two-and-a-half to three years to research and write one of these books, so, to keep the massive project from becoming an ordeal, he has a rule: “I’ve got to like the person.”
He’s drawn to figures whose contributions are worth remembering, but whose lives have been overshadowed by other political figures — or in the case of Crockett, by his larger-than-life reputation. It was Crockett, Williams remembers, who inadvertently led Williams to the story of Winchester.
“I became acquainted with Marcus Winchester when I was writing my book about Davy Crockett,” he says, recounting a story of a river trip Crockett took to meet the future mayor of Memphis, whom Crockett swiftly befriended. “The way Crocket described Winchester made me curious about who he was.”
Who Was Marcus Winchester?
According to Williams, Winchester should be much more widely remembered than he is, but history has endeavored to forget him. “Here’s the reason why: He married someone who wasn’t white, and so he became a warning to people, especially during the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Williams says.
Winchester became a victim of the increasingly polarized atmosphere in the South after he married Amarante Loiselle (called Mary) of New Orleans, who historians agree was a person of color, or so the story goes. Williams explains that the truth was much more nuanced. Though Winchester’s marriage to Mary certainly hurt his social status, it had nothing to do with the eventual hits his finances would weather.
Winchester was born to a wealthy family in middle Tennessee in 1796. At age 16, he left boarding school to serve with his father, James Winchester, in the War of 1812, and was captured at the Battle of River Raisin in Michigan and sent to prison in Canada. After his release, he was present in 1816 when General Andrew Jackson, not yet president of the United States, signed the treaty of the Chickasaw Cession. Winchester’s father was a business partner with Jackson and Nashville businessman John Overton, and the three men owned the 5,000-acre Rice Grant, which included the land that would one day become Memphis. They would lay out the future city in 1819.
“These guys all had their lives going on, so they sent 22-year-old Marcus Winchester to Memphis to do their bidding and set up the town for them to sell lots. For them, it was all just a land deal.”
When Winchester arrived, he found a small village of about 50 people — Native Americans, flatboat workers, and frontier types — living atop the bluffs that would become Memphis.
“He gets to work. He starts the first store. He starts the first ferry,” Williams says, rattling off a long list of Winchester’s bona fides. “He starts the first bank.”
After the city was incorporated in 1832, Winchester was appointed mayor by the city commissioners, though he eventually resigned from that position to successfully pursue the role of postmaster, a position he held until 1849.
“Marcus Winchester was known for running the only bank [where] enslaved people could keep their money, and he would help them save their money. Back then, there was a little sliver of time when people could buy their own freedom or that of their loved ones,” Williams says. “He allowed them to do that when other banks in the South wouldn’t.”
Changing laws in Memphis drove the Winchesters to a house just outside the city limits, but Winchester’s marriage to Mary had nothing to do with his change in fortunes, Williams explains.
“What really caused him to lose all his money was a real estate bubble that burst,” Williams says. After his election, “Jackson did a lot of things in Washington that ultimately caused a depression in the 1840s that ruined Winchester.”
Even after his rise and fall in Memphis, there is much more to Winchester’s story, and it’s all rivetingly told in Townmania, from his land deals in Hopefield, Arkansas, to the succession of developments that replaced the cemetery where he was buried in Memphis in 1856. Closed in the early 1900s, that graveyard became a public park. Today, no marker stands above his gravesite.
The story is one that goes far beyond Winchester’s tenure as Memphis’ first mayor, and Williams’ Townmania is a well-researched trove of information for anyone who wants to know more about one of the pioneering leaders of our city.
