Boy did I double goof.

What Perrin actually wrote about the origin of the Cauldwell name was the following:

"Going to Scotland they purchased, near Solway Firth, the estate of a bishop named Douglass, with the consent of James I, on condition that the said brothers, John, Alexander and Oliver, late of Mount Arid, should have their estate known as "Cauldwell," and when the king should require they should each send a son with twenty men of sound limbs to aid in the wars of the king. An heirloom is a cup, from which it is seen that the estate took its name from a watering-place."

This is not saying that these brothers had an Estate in France that had been called Cold Well. It was saying that the estate in Scotland would be named Cauldwell, after a watering place (well) on the Scottish Estate.

It troubles me that the location of this Estate was said to be in Solway Firth. That is near Edinburgh, not Glasgow. The only Caldwell Estate that I know of (apart from the research here of Tom Caldwell) is the former Caldwell Estate at present day Uplawmoor, East Renfrewshire, and another, formerly at Annanhill, Ayrshire. More details are available from the Family History Library of LDS.

Alexander Cauldwell's son, William Caldwell, was born in Straiton, Ayr(shire), not too far from Annanhill and Uplawmoor, but quite a distance from Solway Firth.

It is pretty well established that the Caldwell Estate of Uplawmoor dates back to at least the late 13th century, if not further back in time.

This means that Perrin's story about a Scottish Estate in Solway Firth does not fit the historical documents.

Bell may have either misread or embellished Perrin's account, giving rise to the popular story of a Cold Well Estate near Toulon.

Bell's 1927 book is the one which added the linkage of the Caldwell brothers to the Waldenses. In being skeptical of the existence of any linkage of the Caldwells to the Waldenses, I place great weight on Perrin's silence. He, after all, had authored a book on the Waldenses.

Bell may have simply relied on the oral stories passed down by either John Caldwell Calhoun's descendants or other Cub Creek Caldwells.

The possibility that Bell innocently misread Perrin's book cannot be easily dismissed. I did not notice immediately the difference between Bell and Perrin's versions, and perhaps nobody else has, either.

As a child of an idle brain, suspicion arises in me that Bell recognized the much broader appeal of his mythic version. The story of the Cold Well brothers from France certainly has been the most publicized.

Wasn't 1927 close to the year of the famous Scopes Trial, that inflamed the passions of Appalachian Protestants, indignant of the ridicule heaped on them by Mencken and the American Mercury? These people likely would take pride in knowing their oldest known ancestors shared their evangelistic values and ability to quote whole passages of scripture.