State of Franklin and Southwest Territory governments. Guests who frequented the Ramsey House during Ramsey's formative years included John Sevier and Willie Blount, and Knoxville founders James White and Charles McClung. Francis Alexander married Margaret "Peggy" Alexander from Mecklenburg, North Carolina on April 7, 1789, and moved his 23 year old bride to his Limestone residence where they lived until 1792 or 1793, when they moved away to Swan Pond. Swan Pond is located within the Lebanon In The Fork area east of Knoxville where the Holston River meets at a confluence with the French Broad River, these rivers together forming the beginning of the Tennessee River. J.G.M. Ramsey studied with private tutors as a child before attending the Ebenezer Academy, located in what is now West Knoxville. He graduated from Washington College (previously, Martin Academy) during March 1816, and later studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He married Margaret Crozier in 1821, and began practicing medicine in Knoxville. Business interests After his father's death in 1820, Ramsey succeeded him as president of the Knoxville Branch of the Bank of Tennessee. During the same period, he began building a large plantation at the confluence of the French Broad and Holston rivers, named "Mecklenburg" after his mother's native Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Along with a large mansion, Mecklenburg included a 4,000-volume library that contained many important documents pertaining to Tennessee's early history, as well as a ferry across the Holston River immediately at its confluence with the French Broad River, east of Knoxville. According to an account of a visit to Mecklenburg by "Ora," a correspondent of the Mobile Advertiser, (and later republished within the April 6, 1862 edition of the Knoxville Register), the Ramsey's Mecklenburg residence was located about 100 yards from "...the ruins of the old Presbyterian Church of Lebanon". As early as 1825, Ramsey had proposed connecting Knoxville with the Atlantic Coast via railroad, which would have given the region's farmers better access to markets in Charleston. Over the years, Ramsey negotiated several hundred thousand dollars worth of bonds, which funded the first railroads built in the region. Ramsey also championed improvements to the Tennessee River that would give Knoxville's river merchants year-round access to the Mississippi River. In 1828, the first steamboat to reach Knoxville, the Atlas, docked at Mecklenburg, prompting Ramsey to give a speech on the meaning of patriotism. During the 1850s, Ramsey served