“I see Congress has converted the Navy Yard into a Rope Walk. Good – Bye - Pinch. This I have feared ever since Polk came into office, for the most leading democrats of Tennessee have an interest in South Memphis, or at least one or two of those have. How it will affect matters I cannot say, for there is so much uncertainty in the things of this world, I admit my inability to look far ahead. But I trust it will not injure business so far down as we are, taking into consideration… the vast interests above us. Have you paid taxes upon the lots in South Memphis on the Mississippi River? We had better do it, or they will kick up a fuss with us some day… “

Son of a US Congressman and Indian Agent from Tennessee, John Lea was the US District Attorney of Nashville when he wrote this letter, which shows his early influence in assisting the development of what was then the larger city of Memphis, 200 miles to the south.  The vote in the US House of Representative, canceling plans to establish a Navy Yard at Memphis must have been an economic blow to the city and particularly to “Pinch”, Memphis’ first commercial area, which was home to Irish and other impoverished European immigrants, as distinct from the older residential neighborhoods of South Memphis, just incorporated as a city in its own right, where Lea and his partners owned valuable riverfront property.

Four years later, Lea would be elected Nashville Mayor and during an ensuing cholera epidemic (which took the life of es-President Polk after he left office) personally helped care for the sick and dying who filled the hospitals. When the Civil War began, as an ardent Unionist, after Nashville was captured by the Union Army, he was instrumental in assisting Confederates who were subjected to Union administration and during Reconstruction defeated a measure to return Tennessee to military control.