Built the bridge at Smith Ford by hand himself in 1895. He was seventeen in 1865, and by 1869 had been appointed one of a five-man jury of review. In 1932, as an old man, he wrote a letter to the Southern Democrat remembering the hard years after the Civil War - the primary source behind much of what’s known about him today.
Appears in: Smith Ford and the Vaughn Bridge and Zelma Clyde Tidwell, Blount County’s Bridge Builder.
Identified: B.H. Vaughn is Burrell Hartwell Vaughn (3 May 1852 - 30 May 1934), buried at Union Grove Cemetery - a son of Thomas Absalom “Ab” Vaughn (1818-1902), confirming a connection this site had previously carried only as a plausible lead.
The identification does not rest on the matching initials alone. His obituary ran in the Southern Democrat on 7 June 1934, eight days after Burrell Hartwell Vaughn’s documented death on 30 May 1934 - the two records fit each other exactly. He is also buried in the right place, and appears as a documented son in Ab Vaughn’s own family record.
One unresolved discrepancy, worth stating rather than smoothing over. This entry and the Smith Ford post both say he was seventeen in 1865. A man born in May 1852 would have been thirteen when the war ended, not seventeen. Note that he would have been exactly seventeen in 1869 - the year of the five-man jury of review - which raises a real possibility that the age in the 1932 letter attaches to the jury appointment rather than to the war’s end, and was carried over to the wrong date somewhere in the retelling. That cannot be settled without re-reading the original letter (Southern Democrat, 17 November 1932). Until it is, the birth date and the “seventeen in 1865” line are inconsistent, and the documented birth date is the better-sourced of the two.