page_title: Rose Glen (Sevierville, Tennessee)
section_title: Robert Hodsden biography
hierarchical_section_title: Rose Glen (Sevierville, Tennessee) / History / Robert Hodsden biography
caption_attribution_description: English: The graves of Dr. Robert Hodsden (right) and daughter Mary Pasteur Hodsden Hicks (left) at the Brabson Cemetery in Boyds Creek, Tennessee, USA. One of the most influential figures in antebellum Sevier County, Hodsden established the Rose Glen plantation several miles to the east in the late 1840s. Hodsden's wife, Elizabeth Brabson was the daughter of John Brabson, who established the Brabson's Ferry Plantation. This cemetery is located on a hill rising immediately north of Brabson's Ferry Plantation, just off Indian Warpath Road.
context_page_description: Rose Glen was an antebellum plantation in Sevier County, in the U.S. state of Tennessee. At its height, Rose Glen was one of the largest and most lucrative farms in Sevier County, and one of the most productive in East Tennessee. While the farm is no longer operational, the plantation house and several outbuildings— including a physician's office, loom house, and double-cantilever barn— have survived intact, and have been placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
  Rose Glen was established in the late 1840s by Dr. Robert Hatton Hodsden, a Sevier County physician and politician who by 1860 had become one of the county's wealthiest individuals. Hodsden was an attending physician for the Cherokee Removal in the late 1830s, and between 1841 and 1845, he represented Blount County in the Tennessee state legislature. Although he was a slave owner, Hodsden was staunchly pro-Union during the American Civil War, and was a member of the Sevier County delegation at the East Tennessee Convention in Greeneville in 1861. Rose Glen is still owned and maintained by Hodsden's descendants.
context_section_description: Born in Smithfield, Virginia in 1806, Robert Hodsden initially worked as a tailor in various cities across the country before he decided to study medicine.  After obtaining his medical degree from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in 1833, Hodsden joined the practice of James Gillespie in Maryville, Tennessee.  He married his first wife, Elizabeth Hook (d. 1842), in 1832.  In 1838, Hodsden was appointed attending physician for the Cherokee Removal, known commonly as the "Trail of Tears."  A member of the Whig Party, Hodsden was elected to the Tennessee state legislature in 1841, where he represented Blount County for four years.  In 1843, after the death of his first wife, Hodsden married a widow, Mary Brabson-Shields (1818–1888), whose father, John Brabson, had established the Brabson's Ferry Plantation at Boyds Creek, and had given his daughter what is now Rose Glen as a gift for her first wedding.  Hodsden and Brabson-Shields initially resided in Maryville, but eventually moved to Rose Glen, where they completed the current plantation house and villa in 1850.  In the decade after the completion of Rose Glen, Hodsden served as the first president of the East Tennessee Medical Society and helped establish Sevier County's first masonic society.
  Although he was a slave owner, and in spite of being married into the pro-secession Brabson family, Hodsden remained a staunch Union supporter throughout the Civil War.  He represented Sevier County at the East Tennessee Union Convention in June 1861, and in November of that year was imprisoned after Confederate authorities accused him of aiding Unionist guerillas in the destruction of several railroad bridges across the Tennessee Valley.  Hodsden was eventually released, however, and returned to Rose Glen, where died of heart failure on June 18, 1864.  In spite of the rift the war had created between Hodsden and his in-laws, Hodsden was buried in the Brabson Cemetery at Brabson's Ferry Plantation.
caption: Graves of Robert Hodsden (right) and daughter Mary Pasteur Hodsden Hicks at Brabson Cemetery
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