John Mcreynolds Gaut was descended from Scotch-Irish ancestors who, coming originally to Pennsylvania, had migrated to Virginia and some generations later, into Tennessee.
His great-grandfather was one of those who fought at King’s Mountain.
He was born on October 1, 184, in Cleveland, Tennessee, and was the son of John Conaway Gaut, a prosperous lawyer, and his wife, Sarah Ann Mc- Reynolds.
Young Gaut was prepared for college at the local academy and graduated at Rutgers in 1866, with the degree of B. A.
Gaut began to practice law in Nashville, Tennessee, in the following year and with that city, significant for religious clearing-house activities and for religious publications, he was identified for the rest of his life.
Gaut was a member of the Nashville city council, 1873-74, and a special judge of the state supreme court in 1881. He was a trustee of the University of Nashville, which later became George Peabody College for Teachers.
He became general counsel for the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America in 1906 and served as a member of the judicial commission of that denomination from 1908 to 1911.
He died in 1918, in his seventy-eighth year.
Gaut was the author of numerous contributions to religious journals and of a pamphlet, Cumberland, or the Story of a Name (1901). He attained national prominence as the result of the union, or reunion, between the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America in 1906. His legal services were utilized in the contests over property precipitated by a minority group which, refusing to enter into the union, continued the name and organization of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. This litigation involved cases in a dozen states and before the United States courts, with the. issues upheld by Gaut receiving almost entire success. In these cases, many important questions of law relating to churches and church unions were settled, and Gaut won recognition among his associates as an authority on the law in its relation to church organizations and property.
A Cumberland Presbyterian and an elder in his local church, Gaut was an important factor in developing the publishing business of his denomination and served as president and general manager of its Board of Publication from 1870 to 1901.
As an advocate of highway improvement, Gaut worked with the state legislature for the public purchase of toll-roads from private interests and the termination of the toll- road system.
Gaut was a lover of nature and lived for forty years at his country place just outside Nashville, called “Alamo” from its surroundings of poplar trees.
Gaut was married on May 5, 1870, to Michal M. Harris, daughter of the proprietor of the Nashville Banner, and after her death some sixteen months later, he married Sallie Crutchfield of Chattanooga, on October 25, 1876.
