John was the fourth child and third son of James Meriwether and Elizabeth Pollard. He married Mary Patterson Bell in 1799 in Albemarle Count, Virginia. They were the parents of ten children: Ann T., Elizabeth Pollard, James Patterson, Louisa R., Lucinda Caroline, Hugh Finley Luckey, Mary Jane, Virginia, John Montgomery, and Sarah C. Meriwether.

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John Meriwether and Molly Bell
The Meriwethers and Their Connections, p. 352

[John Meriwether and his family moved to Kentucky in 1802. Originally they] had settled near Louisville, Kentucky, where they lived for some years. Because land was plentiful on the Indiana side, John Meriwether was induced to settle there on some of the poorest land to be found in the United States, while his Meriwether cousins who stayed in the lush blue-grass country waxed fat politically and financially. His descendants in the early years of the nineteenth century are thought to have coined the expression about poor land: "So poor that a crow has to carry rations when he flies over it." Later his descendants scattered over America, showing that you can learn by experience; some settled in Illinois on the fertile prairies, and later generations traveled to California to put distance between them and "God's poor half-acre" in Indiana. Those remaining in Indiana have gone into endeavors that fallowed, permanently they hope, that land!" 

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This cemetery sits on the original land granted to John Meriwether in 1817 and it is mentioned in his will in 1847:

"I further will that one quarter of an acre of land be kept by my family as a burying place to include the graves now made which graveyard or burying place shall be sacredly kept as such and my no means or under any circumstances whatever be cultivated or tilled by any person or persons whatever."

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New Albany Daily Ledger (New Albany, Indiana), 12 January 1854

In Floyd county, at the residence of his son in law, on the 12th inst. [January], John Meriwether, in the 70th year of his age.

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Note: Family Bible states death was on 11 Jan 1854, which is what is shown here.
∼TMSI [5731]: M1227b — GG-Grandson of Nicholas Meriwether