Perry Cohea was an American pioneer of the early federal period in

Tennessee Tennessee ( , ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked state in the Southeastern region of the United States. Tennessee is the 36th-largest by area and the 15th-most populous of the 50 states. It is bordered by Kentucky to th ...

and

Mississippi Mississippi () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States, bordered to the north by Tennessee; to the east by Alabama; to the south by the Gulf of Mexico; to the southwest by Louisiana; and to the northwest by Arkansas. Miss ...

. He is referred to in historic sources as Major. In the 1830s, he participated in the United States government's removal of the

Choctaw The Choctaw (in the Choctaw language, Chahta) are a Native American people originally based in the Southeastern Woodlands, in what is now Alabama and Mississippi. Their Choctaw language is a Western Muskogean language. Today, Choctaw people are ...

from their Mississippi homelands.

Career

In Tennessee, Cohea served the United States government in the Chickasaw Agency. He was a courier for General James Robertson of Tennessee. He also served as a town marshal in Columbia, Tennessee prior to removing to Mississippi. In 1822 Cohea moved to Lawrence County, Mississippi, an area where European Americans were moving. He briefly became a merchant in Jackson, Mississippi in 1834. By an act of the legislature in 1836, he was appointed to serve as a Commissioner of Public Buildings to oversee the building of the

State Capitol This is a list of state and territorial capitols in the United States, the building or complex of buildings from which the government of each U.S. state, the District of Columbia and the organized territories of the United States, exercise its ...

, after the territory was admitted as a state. He also served on a commission selected by Governor Charles Lynch to determine a site on which to build the state penitentiary.McCain, W. ''Story of Jackson'', p36, p45, p77.

Death and burial

Cohea died in 1848. He is buried in the Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson,

References

American pioneers 1848 deaths Year of birth missing {{tennessee-politician-stub