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Captain Thomas Bedford Jr. (1751-1804) was born in Drakes Branch in (then) Lunenburg County, Virginia in June 1851. The fifth child of Colonel Thomas Bedford and Mary Ligon Coleman.

Enlisted as a private in John Brent's Company, 4th Virginia Regiment commanded by Col. Robert Lawson on 5 Feb 1776. Became Lieutenant in the Continental Army and by war's end he had attained the rank of Captain.

Thomas married, 27 Dec 1780, in Chesterfield County, Virginia to Anne Elizabeth Robertson, daughter of John Robertson and 2nd wife Mary Poindexter. She came from one of the distinguished colonial families of Virginia and was a second cousin to Thomas Jefferson.

He was a Representative to the Virginia General Assembly in 1788. He was also Justice in Charlotte County Virginia in 1790. The family moved to Tennessee in 1795 to take over the large tracts of land he had obtained in the Nashville area. He owned large tracts of land in both Tennessee and Kentucky. In Kentucky around 1799 he sold 10000 acres on Slate Creek to George Nicholas ,"the father of the Kentucky Constitution" just prior to his death.

He settled on a plantation near the town of Old Jefferson, which was on the land between the east and west forks of the Stone's River that was granted to Robert Weakley and Thomas by the State of North Carolina in 1801. They had laid out 102 town lots and a Public Square by 1803 . He sold some of his land here, but still had land holdings in several counties at the time of his unexpected death on the 24th of April 1804. Some of this grant land sold in 1817 for $2 per acre.

Thomas signed the petition requesting the formation of Rutherford County Tennessee which was at that time part of Davidson and Williamson Counties. Most of the people lived in the Stone's River-Stewart Creek area near the town of old Jefferson (Jefferson Springs). Old Jefferson was the original county seat of Rutherford. What was left of the old town is now lost as it is now under the waters of Percy Priest Lake.

Bedford County, Tennessee was formed from Rutherford County in 1807 and named for Captain Thomas Bedford Jr. after his death.