TAMPA, Fla. — After years in a Tampa woman’s possession, Davy Crockett’s marriage license is back home in Tennessee.
Locked up in a vault behind Jefferson County clerk Rick Farrar’s desk, the license sits safely with other historic Crockett documents, Farrar said.
It was delivered last week, after a Tennessee judge ordered Margaret Smith, 90, to return it by Feb. 7 or face $500 a day in fines.
Farrar is in charge of the safekeeping of the document until an appeal filed by Smith’s lawyers is decided, said her lawyer and son, Vance Smith.
Margaret Smith said in December that she inherited the 1805 marriage license from her uncle, who claimed he found it discarded when officials were cleaning house.
Jefferson County asked for the license back. Margaret Smith refused, and the battle went to a Tennessee court last year.
The judge said in his ruling that “circumstantial evidence” suggests that one of Margaret Smith’s ancestors took the document from the county’s depository. In November, he ordered her to surrender the document.
County historian Robert Jarnagin said Margaret Smith’s uncle worked at the Jefferson County Courthouse during the 1930s and ‘40s and there is no evidence county officials threw any documents away.
The Jefferson County Courthouse is filled with other marriage licenses from the era dating back to 1792.
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