We sat down with Stephen Johnson on November 10, 2024, to talk about his decades-long conservation efforts in the West Point, Ga., area. His family arrived in the area soon after the Muscogee people were forced out of the area by all the forces, governmental and otherwise, arrayed against them.
Stephen has managed to hold on to the family land and buy up surrounding properties with a conservation easement ensuring they won’t be developed or swallowed up by the office park down the highway. The location of the interview? The cabin he built overlooking Flat Shoals Creek, known locally as the location of the spider shoal lillies that bloom every May when Stephen has invited people, especially photographers, to visit and enjoy the sight.
In late 2024 Stephen sold the cabin and property to artist Michael Murrell, who continues the tradition of welcoming people to see the lillies blooming each weekend in May.
p.s. Stephen is also the author of 500 Horrible Ways to Die in Georgia: A Collection of Grim, Grisly, Gruesome, Ghastly, Gory, Grotesque, Lurid, Terrible, Tragic, Bizarre, and Sensational Deaths Reported in Georgia Newspapers Between 1820 and 1920, a book that belongs in every Georgia rental cabin.
TRANSCRIPT
Well, you want me to tell my family first?
Yeah. Well, this property has probably been in my family since 1830.
My great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Johnson, moved here from Upson County in 1830 with his wife and three children. We know it was in 1830 because the third child was born in Upson County in 1829, according to his obituary.
And then he and his wife and children are in the 1830 census for Harris County.
He probably bought this from somebody who drew it in the land lottery of 1825 or 27 when this part of the state was opened up.
He had another piece of property further down the road, down what's now Highway 103, and that's where his cotton plantation was.
And he also owned an island in the Chattahoochee River, still known as Johnson's Island.
But he had this place to build a mill and a covered bridge on. The main road went right across the covered bridge across this creek a little further down.
It's not there anymore. It was the covered bridge washed away in a flood in 1948, and they rerouted the road.
But anyway, Benjamin Johnson lived here, and his house was further down on his plantation, further down the road. So he didn't live on this property. But on the other side of the creek there are remains of tenant houses.
My mother had a classmate in high school who grew up on the other side of the creek, and I got her to walk the old road with me one time. And she pointed out where all the houses were that she remembered. But they're all gone now. So there was a little bit of clearing and timber cutting and farming on the other side of the creek, but not much on this side. There's more land on the other side of the creek than there is on this side.
But I've got it all under a conservation easement and its will to the nature of Conservancy.
And I just have a life estate in it.
Well, Benjamin Johnson lived here until, lived down the road actually, until 1870 when he decided to give up farming. He was 63 years old by then, and he couldn't work with free blacks.
He had to have slaves.
So he sold the farm and the island to his son, who was my great grandfather, John David Johnson.
And Benjamin and his wife moved into West Point.
My great grandfather, John David Johnson, and his wife lived down there on the house that he grew up in, and they had several more children during the 1870s, one of whom was my grandfather.
And John David Johnson, Benjamin's son, was the first president of West Point Manufacturing Company.
But he only stayed as president one year and got new machinery and got a superintendent in to run the mills. There were two mills on the Chattahoochee River, one at Langdale and one at Riverview.
And actually the one at Langdale was the only one in West Point Manufacturing Company in 1880 when he was president. Then he sold all his stock to the Linneos and went back to cotton farming. And in 1884, he and his family moved into West Point so the children could go to public school.
And the children remembered their grandfather, Benjamin, and they remembered the mill out here. There was a mill a little further down the creek, and the miller was cousin Tommy Smith, who was the first cousin of my great grandfather.
His mother was Benjamin Johnson's sister. And they said he had a beard, and it always had flour in it, and they called him Santa Claus.
And the mill ground both corn and wheat.
So the mill is no longer there. Apparently it was gone pretty soon after 1900. But the millstones stayed there, and my grandmother had three of the millstones moved to our house in West Point.
And I gave two of them to the West Point Depot when they restored it. And they're in the yard there as decorations.
I don't have a picture of the mill, but I do have a picture of the covered bridge.
And from the research I've done, it was only built in 1901. It was not a Horace King bridge. It was probably built by his sons. There was a bridge there before that that blew down in a windstorm.
But then the one that washed away in 1948 was less than 50 years old. And it washed away in a flood that was caused by John Wallace's farm pond dam breaking.
Now John Wallace grew up in West Point. His parents are buried in the West Point Cemetery.
And I knew a lady who was the same age as him.
And she told me that he was so mean when he was a little boy that a mother told her if she saw him coming down the sidewalk, get in the house quick. He'd just as soon beat you up as look at you.
So he inherited his mother's farm in Meriwether County.
And he was the boss of Meriwether County. He had the sheriff and everybody under his control.
And he killed a man. And the story is told in the book Murder in Coweta County.
He killed a man and then they chased him over the line into Coweta County where they killed him.
And he was convicted and got the electric chair.
And it was the first time a white man had ever been convicted on a black man's testimony.
The night before they had the auction to auction off all his property, they had a terrible rainstorm and his farm pond dam washed out. And it was at the headwaters of this creek.
And a flood came down the creek and washed away all the covered bridges. And killed two people.
And the Atlanta Journal has a picture of it washing away that somebody took. And you see the headwaters leaning way down. In Meriwether County. This creek starts in Meriwether County near Warren Springs. That's been a huge time. It has several tributaries like White Sulfur Creek, Turkey Creek, and Troup County. A lot of others. So there's a lot of water in the creek when it floods. And we've had several small floods here.
And in fact this spring we had a canoe party overturning a flood and two people drowned in this creek. It was in March or April. So it can be a pretty rough creek.
But then I'm curious, can you figure out where the mill was?
Yes. The pillars are still there. The rock pillars are still there.
I'm curious how these stories have passed down to you.
Well, I grew up in West Point in my grandmother's house. During World War II. Everything was so unsettled and my parents were living in Columbus.
And the landlord wanted the house back. And my brother was about to be born three months later. And my daddy was being threatened by the draft board. My mother just picked me up and took me to the house. My mother just picked me up and took me to West Point to live with my grandmother. And we never left.
And so I grew up in West Point. But I heard stories from my grandmother. And then my great aunt Florie, who was John David Johnson's daughter. My grandfather's sister was an old maid.
And then my aunt lived with us who was a retired school teacher. So they all told stories about what they remembered about the family.
And when Benjamin Johnson moved into West Point, he had married a widow with two children who was seven years older than he was. And she died first. And the story I've heard is that he wanted to get married again. But his children wanted him to wait a year before he got married.
So they were all at his house trying to persuade him to wait a year to get married. And he was a big man with a bad temper. So the story goes.
And he just cussed them out and told them to get out of his house. He'd do what he pleased. And they left and he went out to the barn to sulk. And he had a stroke and died out there.
And I found proof of that in the LaGrange newspaper.
He and his wife were buried on the land next door to the land he owned. And my aunt always wondered why wasn't he buried on his own land. And I think I know why. He was a primitive Baptist. And the primitive Baptists seemed to be almost like a cult. They have their own cemeteries, apparently.
And they just don't mix with other denominations very much. There are a lot of first cousin marriages. And there were in Benjamin Johnson's family. There were several first cousin marriages. So they were all primitive Baptists. And they went to Sardis, a primitive Baptist church in Harris County. Which is totally abandoned now. There's an old cemetery there, totally grown up. But that's where Benjamin Johnson's youngest sister is buried with a husband. So I've heard a lot of stories about this part of the country.
My mother's classmate, her name was Margaret Milford, she was a Parker. And she was born and grew up on the other side of the creek. And I took her with me on the other side of the creek to walk the old road. And she showed me where all the houses were that she remembered.
My mother taught school in a one room schoolhouse on this side of the creek. And she would ride with her mother when she was a little girl in the horse and buggy. And they'd go over the covered bridge, but first they'd stop at the houses and pick up other children. And then all go over the covered bridge and up to the schoolhouse. And she'd sit in the corner while my mother taught school.
And the schoolhouse is no longer there. And I haven't been able to find out anything about it. But there were people living all over Harris County. It was a very rural county.
In fact, my Aunt Flora didn't like to admit that she was born in Harris County. She thought it was the biggest moonshining and bootlegging county in the state. And she was ashamed of that.
Is there any moonshining?
I found the remains of a still on this side of the creek up in one of the little creeks to the side.
What does that look like? What would it look like?
Big metal drums like oil drums. Just a lot of rusting metal. Not much as you can recognize.
Was the creek used by, was there any sort of, were there mills lining the creek?
I know there was another mill further up the creek. There was another covered bridge between here and the Highway 18 bridge.
And I'm sure there were other mills. I went to a lecture one time at a historical society where a man talked about these grist mills and said they were so common, they were like 7-11 stores. They had one every few miles. Because people depended on them.
Signs of Native Americans in the area? Did they talk of it?
Yeah. Somebody has dug up some Indian pottery upstream in a place called the Big Eddie, there's a cave called Cook's Cave. It's just a big rock overhang. And somebody went and then dug up a lot of Indian pottery pieces and just left them on the ground. And I gathered them up and put them in a bucket. But I was told, "Well, they're no good unless you can find out how they were in relation to each other." Not worth anything. But, you know, Indian pottery was fairly common here. And they found it along the Chattahoochee River in West Point, inside the city limits.
And I've been told that the Indians in the 1800s, before they were moved out, were living like the white men. In log cabins. And farming and raising animals. And they were trying to adopt a European way of life.
They weren't savages living in teepees. And some of them actually owned land in Chambers County across the land. You can find Indian names in the deed records in early Chambers County.
Harris County, is there any records of that kind of on the Georgia side?
I don't think so. I've never seen any or heard of anything.
You've heard of Benjamin Hawkins. Oh, yeah. Did you have an influence extend up here?
I don't think so. I think he operated a little further south. The main road across the Chattahoochee, I think, was about where Columbus is.
And that was the main road between Indian Springs and Montgomery, that area. But there was an Oakfuskey trail here. I don't know much about the Indian history here.
Yeah, yeah. I've learned, maybe I can share some stories about that. I've learned a little bit more. Yeah. I don't know much. I'm talking about more modern times.
Can you talk a little bit about when you came and built the house and what you've seen in this area?
Well, I didn't really know where the boundaries of this property were or whether it was even in my family or not. And I just never went out here. Before the road was paved, there was just no reason to come out here. The road was paved. Highway 103 was paved in 1957.
And the bridge washed away in 1948. They built a new bridge in 1950, and it was still a dirt road. And they paved it in 1957, I remember. And before that, we just never came out here.
So when I inherited the property, I was given part of it when I turned 21 by my grandmother. And I was in several different ownership. So my grandmother gave me part of it, I think a fourth, when I turned 21 to get it out of her estate. And then she died later that year. So I was the only grandchild who was 21.
So I owned part of it. And then my mother and my aunt gave me part of another piece they owned further down in Harris County. And that other piece was where Blanton Creek Campground is now.
So I owned both pieces together with my aunt in West Point, who was a retired schoolteacher. And another aunt in Atlanta who was an aunt by marriage, my uncle's widow. And in 1977 or 78, the aunt in Atlanta wanted to sell her share. So we made a swap and I chose this piece of land and sold my interest in the other piece of land to them.
And that other piece is where Blanton Creek Campground is now.
And then about your decision to build that house here and how you used it.
Well, I just liked the idea of having a log cabin, the more I read about them. And in a way, I wish I'd never built it. But I found about a log home company in Pine Mountain and got them to build it. And this is the best place to put it, really, where I could hear the creek and you don't hear the road very much from this location. But in a way, I wish I'd built it further back from the road. In another way, I wish I'd never built it at all. I'd have a lot more money now if I hadn't built it. It's been a big drain on my finances.
Sorry to hear that, but you live a beautiful, beautiful spot and it's like a warm, crazy place inside. I imagine you've got a lot of pleasure out of it.
I have, yeah. I've been entertained here at a guest town and allowed people to...
What year was it built? 1988.
34 years old. Beginning to show its age. I've had to have the roof replaced. I've had to have the deck replaced. There's just too much maintenance connected with it. A lot more than I expected. It's been broken into three times. So that's why I have all this security on it.
To me this is like a state park. It has the potential to be a state park in the fact that I'm sure people in the community have used it and still use it over the years.
Oh yeah. They have a reputation in the community. All the locals have always been fishing here. I've had people tell me they've come here and fished all their lives.
And when I first built the cabin, it got broken into almost immediately. The gate knocked down because the locals just couldn't believe this was private property. They thought it was theirs. And that's the general attitude if it's vacant property. The locals think it doesn't belong to anybody and nobody cares. Of course the law says it was.
But I've let people fish here and canoe. The canoes and kayaks coming down the creek all the time in warm weather.
Are people making the trip all the way down from Chattahoochee? Do you know where they're going?
They usually take out at Highway 103 Bridge. They put in at Highway 18 and take out at Highway 103. I have been all the way down to the Chattahoochee before. You have to go across the Chattahoochee and around the north end of Johnson's Island. And use the Riverview boat landing to take out.
Were you using the little jump boat that I've seen down my way?
No, it washed up here on the flood last year. Just mine by default.
Yeah, I mean, I would like to hear a little bit more about growing up and then what you did professionally and education-wise, if you don't mind. Talk a little bit more about yourself.
Oh, that's a sad story. I just made one mistake after another.
Do you think it's a product of older age where you look back and you see everything with more clarity about things you should have done, which is what I'm starting to experience?
Definitely. All right.
You know, when I was in high school, I didn't know what I wanted to be. I was just interested in everything. You know, I just had an insatiable curiosity about everything. The house I grew up in, we had Life magazine and National Geographic. We didn't have TV until I was 13, and then it was just entertainment.
But I read all the time. I learned to read and write when I was three years old.
And I just, you know, stayed busy reading and exploring the woods back of the house, and I loved nature. My mother didn't like me to love nature. You know, don't go out there. Watch out for snakes. Watch out for brows [???]. I always loved nature. I love birdwatching.
And then when I went to college, I didn't know what to major in. I should have majored in history. But what can you do with a history degree? And I never made an A in a history course.
And I realized now it was because I couldn't answer the discussion questions. I couldn't see the big picture. I could memorize specific facts, but I couldn't put them all together in a sensible paragraph.
So chemistry appealed to me because it was fun. The lab work was fun. It was all objective.
Everything, the answers were either right or wrong. I hated English courses because you never knew whether your answer was what the teacher wanted.
But I majored in chemistry in college, and I almost flunked out doing it because I didn't have the math background for it. Something got left out in my math education.
But I scraped through and got a bachelor's degree. And then I was in the Air Force for three years. You had to be in something or you got drafted. In 1962, the Berlin Wall had just gone up.
I went to Emory at Oxford my first two years, and I loved it.
And then I went to Big Emory the next two years, and I hated it. It was just a totally different world.
But Emory at Oxford was like a big happy family where everybody knew everybody, and we were all from small towns.
And we had to create our own entertainment.
And it was just fun going to school.
I still go to reunions, still keep in touch with the friends I had there.
And there were several people from West Point who went there the same time I did.
So I knew people when I got there. But in 1962, you had to be in the military. You'd get drafted if you didn't volunteer for something. So I took ROTC at Emory and went in the Air Force as a lieutenant, and I didn't do the Air Force one bit of good. I think they just wasted money on me. But I served my time and got out. And I decided I wanted to teach because it's the only thing I knew I could do best.
But I couldn't get a master's degree in chemistry in no way. So I changed to biology, and I wasn't too successful at that. But I did get a master's degree, and then I went into high school teaching, and taught in the public schools a few years, and then gave up on that. And I had to come back here to West Point. My father died when I was 31, and he owned a store in West Point. I had to help my mother sell it and inventory it and sell it. And then my aunt, who was living at home, she died a few years later. And I had a younger brother who was an invalid, who was born with myotonia congenital, which is a genetic disease that makes you completely helpless, except for your brain is normal, but no muscular ability at all.
He had to be waited on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so I moved back home and taught in the private school in Lynette, Alabama, Springwood School.
And I finally left there in 1996.
My mother died in 1993. My brother died six years before that.
And so after I got my mother's estate settled, I said, you know, I'm through with teaching.
Can't do it anymore.
So I devoted my time to environmental activity, historic preservation, genealogy research.
And then, you know, I finally had to get rid of the house in West Point and move to Atlanta, where I could be closer to good doctors and hospitals.
In 2018, I got hit with a ruptured appendix clear out of the blue. And that put me in the hospital three weeks and then a rehab home three weeks. And they said I could have died if I'd waited any longer. So I said, I can't live by myself anymore. I've got to move to an old folks home. So I found out about Spring Harbor in Columbus, and it's cheaper than the ones in Atlanta. So that's where I'm living now. And I'm 84 now.
I don't know how much longer I can keep going, because all the men in my family have died young. I had four uncles who all died before the age of 44.
My mother's father died at 44, but he died of the influenza epidemic while he was serving in France with the YMCA in World War I.
My other grandfather, my father, was from South Georgia. He was a Methodist preacher's son. So they lived all over the place. But my grandparents were from Dooley County. So I've got a lot of cousins and ancestors there.
And my grandfather lived to be 94. He was a Methodist preacher. So I hope I got his genes.
He was healthy right up till the end.
Bought us glasses at the dime store.
It was sporting goods. He was a big fisherman every Wednesday and every Sunday. It was fishing. Nothing would stop him.
And he dragged me along, and I hated it.
I couldn't sit still that long. We'd stay out till it got too dark to see.
I'd get hungry. I hated it.
My uncle had built a little camp on some land my grandmother owned at the mouth of Long Cane Creek.
It's been sold since then. But there's a little shack there. And I remember it as just a shack that was falling down. But it was livable at one time, but my daddy would keep a boat down there. And we'd go down there, and he'd take the boat, and we'd go out in the middle of the river and fish. And I'd have to sit there in the middle of the river, and I couldn't explore anything around. And I'd get hungry, and I didn't care whether I caught a fish or not.
And I still hate fishing, and I don't even like to eat fish to this day.
But his store sold--he wanted to sell mainly fish and tackle. He was an expert on fishing. People would come to him asking what lure to buy and where to go fishing and what to catch. That was his specialty. But he had to sell sports equipment and all kinds of other things. Model airplanes, toys, just everything in that store.
And he was the sole owner and proprietor. He put everything into that store.
And then he died suddenly of a heart attack when he was only 60.
And you mentioned Long Cane Creek. Do you have any memories of the river cane growing?
Well, there's small cane here, but not anything any bigger than that. I've never seen anything any bigger except bamboo that people have planted. That's a real pest once you get it started.
I've never seen any of the bigger cane.
It used to be quite abundant.
Wonder why it's not that anymore.
I think probably people clearing land to farm.
But it seems like there would have been some come back. Unless there was a disease or something that wiped it out.
What about, I know you've taken a strong stance to protect the creek here in the Silver Hills, especially, you know, the industrial park and...
Yeah, I just found out that Shoal Spider, it was a threatened species. After I owned the property, the Georgia Botanical Society had a field trip here. And so I realized how important it was.
It was only found, at that time, it was only found three places in Georgia. Yeah, and the Flint River and the Broad River at Anthony Shoal's. They've gotten seeds from them, planted them in the Chattahoochee at Columbus. I know a couple in Upson County who've planted them in a creek next to their property. They're growing.
And in fact, we even took some seeds down to the water garden at Spring Harbor where I live. We've got a courtyard with a fountain and a little flowing water. And we've planted some of that under there. It's coming up. Got leaves on them, no flowers yet. But they can be propagated easily if you have the right habitat. But they require full sunlight all day, clean water, no silt in the water.
They get competed by other species really, so if there's silt in the water.
So I found out I was going to donate this property to the Nature Conservancy. And I had it divided up into several pieces. And then I found out I could come out better financially with a conservation easement.
With a conservation easement, you just put your property under a permanent conservation easement. And all you do is give up your development rights.
You keep all your other private property rights.
And you can will the land or sell it to anybody you want to, but the easement has to stay in place.
And you've got a tax deduction, a federal tax deduction, equal to the cost of the development rights. And you can carry it forward for 15 years, up to 50% of your income. And any landowner can do this if it's undeveloped land. Most people don't know about it.
When you sell it, does that transfer you the next owner's development rights?
Yeah, next owner has to keep the easement in place.
Do they get the tax benefits?
No. The tax benefits only last 15 years to the original person to establish them.
That's going to help protect the street and the soil areas from, you know, right, the industrial stuff happening nearby. And when they built that industrial park, it was a done deal before they had the public hearing on it. They already had the land.
And so I called everybody I knew in Harris County and asked them to come to the hearing. And I got up and spoke.
I said, I'm not opposed to the industrial park, but I'm opposed to this location.
I told them I had a big display about my spider lilies, told them why the creek was important.
And of course, they said, well, that was only land we could get. That was a lie.
And only one other person stood up to support me.
So I crossed several friends off my list right there that came to the hearing and didn't say anything.
They actually own part of the west bank of the creek. The creek makes a bend and they own that bend on the east side of the creek and the park on the west side. But there's another creek coming in, a sizable creek comes in, a tributary comes in at that place so they couldn't develop it. But when they first built the park, I walked up there and they had red dirt piled up at about a 45 degree angle. And silt fences overflowing with red mud and the mud was falling over onto my property line.
So I called Sally Bethea at the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper office and told her about it. And she said, well, this is criminal trespass. And she helped me write a letter to the Georgia Environmental Protection Agency.
And I sent a copy of the letter and pictures of the damage to them and to the Harris County manager. I said, this is criminal trespass. This is a violation of the law.
Please stop it at once.
And EPD shut them down for a week and fined them $15,000.
And then six months later, they [CRK] did it again without me asking them to.
Have you noticed changes in the water quality since you've been here?
Not that much. Maybe a little more silt. Every time there's a big rainstorm, the creek gets very muddy.
A lot of silt being washed in. I think one of the main contributors is the Wild Animal Safari at Pine Mountain. It's on a tributary of flat shoals.
I've been there to see it, and the ground is completely bare.
And it's not level.
And the animals don't look good either.
Do you know much about the people who own the land upstream from Union? Yeah, I've gotten a list of all the other landowners.
And of course, it's changed since I made it out. I tried to find out who all the other landowners were. And just for my own information. But I don't know any of them personally.
Have you spent any time on the creek upstream as it is?
Oh yeah. I've walked all the way up to the upper part of my boundary. I can't do it now.
But 20 years ago, I walked all over the property and walked all the property lines.
Is there anything on the far side of the creek here that's kind of noteworthy?
Well, on the other side of the creek, the south part of it was where all the tenant houses were. And I have aerial photos that somebody at the Nature Conservancy gave me. I'll think of his name in a minute. But the aerial photos show that there was a good deal of clearing in the 1920s and 30s. And then the depression hit and people moved into town to work in the mills.
So all those houses were abandoned. So there hasn't been any timber cutting on this property since I inherited the property in 1977.
No trees cut except a few that were leaning toward the house or across the driveway.
And on the upper part of the creek, across the creek, there's some really nice hardwoods. Little rocky streams coming into the main creek.
A lot of really nice scenery.
And I suspect there's a good deal of bird life over there like warblers and owls. It's a really good Nature Preserve. There's big deer. You just have to have them. Yeah, we do have deer here. I don't allow hunting.
Are we able to walk across the land here across the creek?
If you get your feet wet. This time of year you can.
Well, this time of year it's easier to walk across the creek if you use a stick to steady yourself. Rocks are slippery. But in terms of walking into the land, I mean, is that... Well, I've got access on the other side of the creek now. A farm came up for sale over on Marshall Williams Road, and I bought 15 acres of it. So I could have an access strip and then a little piece of land right next to my property. So we can get in that way. I can show you where it is if you want to.
Can you talk a little bit about how you feel about preserving this little area and your conservation details? I mean, to me you've contributed a lot by doing this.
I'm a fanatic about preservation of land. We need more of it. Any type of land. I've told people about these conservation easements everywhere I go. If you own land, put a conservation easement on it. It's a win-win situation for everybody. Of course, everybody's so development-oriented now.
But a lot of people don't want to listen. But I went to a Merrill Lynch seminar in Columbus, and they had these four so-called experts talking about how to reduce your income taxes.
They didn't say anything I didn't already know.
When the question and answer period came, I raised my hand and I said, "I reduced my taxes another way." I told them about my conservation easement and how it works. I said, "I haven't paid any income taxes in the last eight years. Any landowner can do this." Most people don't know about it. They all four said, "Yeah, you're right. We never heard of this."
When the meeting broke up, people came running over to me. "Hey, what do you call that thing you got? How can I get one?"
We have a land trust office in Columbus that will walk you through the process.
You have to have the land appraised, and you have to have a lawyer draw up a legal document.
Those are the expenses connected with it, but the benefits far outweigh the expenses.
You might have to do a little public service announcement video based on what you do. You have to explain the word.
Is there an understanding with the Nature Conservancy? Are there any plans, 50 years from now?
I think this place is probably one of their lower priorities.
They seem to be all excited about the Altamaha River and the mountains and the coast.
They know this place exists, but they just don't pay that much attention to it.
I hope it stays preserved permanently.
I've been told by people in the Nature Conservancy that they do want it to be open to the public, not just shut off from the world. I'd like for people to be able to see it.
How many acres are we talking about?
I've got a total of 400 acres. I inherited about 260, and I've bought several pieces over the years to add to it.
Most recently, about eight years ago, I bought this piece by the road, 63 acres. It was originally timber company land, Midwest, they co-owned it, and then they sold it to Weyerhouse. I bought it from Weyerhouse when it came up for sale.
I bought it so the industrial park couldn't get it. It's right just below the industrial park.
That protects the west side of the property below the industrial park. The upper part of my property borders the industrial park.
Then on the east side of the creek, it's just all houses and farms and woods over there.
This is contiguous land?
Yeah. I've got parts of two whole land lots, and then the 63-acre piece and the 15-acre piece are in separate land lots. We're connected to the rest of the property.
Is that something with the Nature Conservancy of other properties they have?
Do they formally make them parks that are open to the public?
Not all of them, no.
Some of them. I know I've been in one Nature Conservancy property in Arizona, but you had to get permission to go on. They were really careful about who they let on it and had strict rules.
Did you want that kind of thing to be this property?
Well, I'd want there to be laws enforced against hunting and trespassing and camping. I found somebody camping here on my back porch one time. So the place has to be looked after.
I hope whoever occupies the cabin will help serve that purpose, look after the property and keep trespassers off and keep violators off. I want people to use it, but not abuse it.
This is one of the streams where people can go down the stream without any laws protecting them. I think legally I probably own the stream, but I don't keep people off of it.
The owner owns the bed of the stream but not the right to the water necessarily. And they're trying to change that.
Are there specimen trees in this area that are of that kind of value in terms of history?
No, I don't think so. It's just a nice hardwood forest, mixed hardwood, some pines, a lot of really big trees. I know there's some well over 100 years old probably.
There's a beech tree on our property I guess 10 miles up the creek. Yeah. And we measured then did the math and it's around 250 years old.
The other thing I heard about was your efforts to preserve Cumberland Island. How did you get involved with that?
Well, you know I just always loved the coast. Never got to see much of it. But when in the 1960s the Journal-Constitution Magazine came out with an issue about Cumberland Island. They had an aerial view of Cumberland on the cover and the Secretary of Interior Stuart Udall had visited Cumberland and met with Lucy Ferguson and had the picture together in the article and they had gotten interested in preserving the island. The situation was that the island couldn't be sold or divided until the last grandchild of Thomas Carnegie died. Or child, I forget which. Anyway, in 1959 the last child died and the island was divided up among all the different families that were heirs of Thomas Carnegie. And one branch of the family wanted it to be a national park and they got Stuart Udall down there to visit. And others didn't want anything. They wanted everybody to go away and leave them alone.
And then part of the island was owned by the Candlers up at the north end. And then everything south of that was owned by the Carnegie family, heirs. And then there was Little Cumberland Island which was separate, a separate group. So nobody was in agreement very much until Charles Frazier of Hilton Head came in and bought a piece from one of the heirs and bulldozed an air strip and started planning a big development. And that's when they woke up and saw the handwriting on the wall. They needed to do something and all reach agreement on something.
And so eventually in the 1960s, late 1960s, they all decided the national park was the best idea or national seashore. It's technically not a national park. Well, I just got interested in it and about that time in the ‘60s conservation groups were starting to organize. I don't think there was anything before the Georgia Conservancy organized in 1967. And I read about it and I joined it. And then about the same year or a year later we organized a Sierra Club group in Georgia. Now I had gotten interested in the Sierra Club two years before that. I read about it. It was mainly a western group but I'd done a lot of hiking and camping and backpacking out west by then. And so I liked the idea of the Sierra Club and I joined it.
And then somebody in Decatur sent out postcards to all the Georgia Sierra Club members saying, "Do you want to organize a group?" There were 19 of us and we all met at a cafeteria in Decatur and had a meeting and organized a group. Who worked at the Northern Air Force? Bill Bake was his name, B-A-K-E. He was a professor at DeKalb Junior College. And he was enthusiastic about it.
And then I was at the University of Georgia in graduate school by then. And there were three of us who were sort of interested in backpacking and hiking and the outdoors. And so I invited the other two to the meeting. We ended up being the conservation committee. So we found out through a contact that the lawyer for the Carnegie family lived in Atlanta. And we went to see him and asked, you know, what do the owners think about all this, you know, and we're trying to decide whether the Sierra Club should support the National Seashore idea.
He said, "Well, I'm going down there the next weekend. Why don't you go with me?" So we flew down in an air—well, I think we flew in an air taxi. Or maybe Sam Candler flew us down there in his plane, you know. I can't remember. But three of us went down there one weekend in January and met with Rick Ferguson and his wife. And he was Lucy Ferguson's son. And we were planning to stay in that Grayfield Lodge if we had to.
You know, it was a big expense, but I think it cost less than $100 then, but we would have paid it just to stay on the island.
And Rick Ferguson's wife said, you boys don't want to pay that much money. Why don't you camp out in this other house we've got? So they owned another house called Serendipity.
And they let us camp in that, in our sleeping bags. We brought our sleeping bags with us. And I remember the next morning, there was ice on the ground. It was so cold. But when we flew to the island, they flew us all up and down the length of the island. That's the only time I've ever seen the Carnegie Family Cemetery.
I would love to go in that cemetery and explore it. But anyway, it's not accessible to the public.
But it's just a fabulous place. All that wilderness and the longest beach in Georgia and the highest sand dunes on the eastern coast.
You know, the thing just had to be protected. So we got to promoting the National Seashore idea. And the Georgia Conservancy always had our conference at Callaway Gardens every year. So we set up a big exhibit about Cumberland Island and said support the National Seashore. Well, the Georgia Conservancy wouldn't do anything until they were sure it was okay to do it. And then of course they took the credit for it.
But I went to Washington to the public hearing when they had a bill to create the National Seashore and I read a statement for the Sierra Club. And everybody was in favor of it except the electric company who had installed underground power lines. And they weren't happy that it wasn't gonna be developed. But eventually the island did get made a National Seashore.
And so our Sierra Club group would have camping trips over there regularly, even before they had campgrounds.
Sam Candler would fly us over there in his plane. Or they'd take an air taxi from Brunswick and we'd land on the Candler property. And Sam Candler gave us permission to camp out on the Candler property. And we just hiked all over the island and explored it and fell in love with it. And I've loved it ever since.
So that's one of our success stories.
And eventually Charles Frazier left, he sold his property and cleared out.
But then somebody else sold 52 acres to some man who developed individual house lots.
And I just hope no more of it gets sold by anybody.
There's something going on now with this, I wonder what's involved. Yeah, Sally Bethea sent me an email about it and said she was gonna call me and explain what I could do. And she never called back and I never followed up on it. So I just stay so busy, I just don't have time to do much environmental work anymore.
Well, I was a member of the Georgia Sierra Club group, but I wasn't that active in 1992.
I was living in West Point then, but it was the 100th anniversary of the Sierra Club. And they asked each chapter to do something special to celebrate the centennial of the Sierra Club.
Well, I had the idea of having a banquet and inviting Edgar Wayburn to speak. Edgar Wayburn was a big wheel in the Sierra Club in California, but he grew up in Macon, Georgia. And he was actually a friend of my mother's first cousin, so I had contact with him. So we contacted him and invited him to be a speaker at our banquet. Well then everything fell through. The newsletter editor resigned, we couldn't publicly sit in the newsletter.
We had to mail out invitations to the rest of the membership. We had to get commitments in order to reserve the facility. Dr. Wayburn was pressuring me, I gotta know something, I gotta make my plane reservations. We finally had to give up on the ideal.
So we never got Dr. Wayburn back to Georgia to speak. But some of us did meet him at a conference in San Francisco a few years later.
So you've been kind of recognized as the local historian or the storyteller?
I probably know more about West Point history than anybody now, even though I don't live there. And I know a lot of stories from growing up in a small town. You see where Southern writers get their material.
They grow up in small towns and they just look around them. You ever thought about writing fiction?
I can't write fiction. I couldn't think of a story if I had to.
So how did you get started with the archival research on deaths and growth?
Well, I've done a lot of genealogy research. My grandmother and my aunt, Laura Francis, were into genealogy. And they took me around to courthouses and cemeteries and made me help them copy information down. So I got to know my ancestors on my mother's side pretty well.
But on my daddy's side, they all lived in counties where the courthouses burned. So that's been more of a challenge.
Now, in the 1980s, I started getting serious about genealogy research because I started investigating a story my grandfather told me on my father's side. His grandfather had come to Georgia from New York.
And the story was that my grandfather read about a gravestone in the Macon newspaper.
And there was an article about this one gravestone out in the middle of nowhere in Twiggs County, Georgia. It said, "In memory of Melanchton B. Johnson, a native of Cambridge, New York, who died 1827 in the 22nd year of his age."
Well, my grandfather had been told by his father that his grandfather came from New York with tuberculosis.
He landed in Savannah by ship and hitched a ride on a cotton wagon to get away from the coast and ended up in Twiggs County. Was taken in by a local family. And he married the daughter of that family and took her back up to New York. And that first child was born up there, who was my grandfather's father.
And his name was Melanchton B. Johnson.
So my grandfather called the newspaper and said, "That's my grandfather's grave."
And he told all about the story and mentioned names and who did what. And that story has been reprinted in two different county histories.
Well, then the research I did on that family just didn't support some of the facts in that story.
My grandfather said that was his grandfather who died in 1827.
But my grandfather's father's obituary said he was born in 1829, two years later, in Cambridge, New York. So that's not possible. And his age and every census agreed with that. So I thought something's wrong somewhere.
So I went to New York in 1986. I think I went up there for the first time. And in New York at that time, there was no central location for any archives. There was no state archives, no county archives anywhere. You had to go to each little individual town and village.
And they had sometimes two or three different courthouses in a county. The counties are divided into townships. So I went to Cambridge, New York, and it's a town, but it's in actually three different townships. So I had to go to several different places, just collecting whatever records I could find. I knew the name of my grandfather's great grandfather.
And I found his grave in the Presbyterian Church Cemetery, along with several other members of the family.
But I didn't find until my second trip, when they'd built a county archives and had all the records centralized, I asked for, can I see the state papers of Thias Johnson? Thias Johnson was the father of the man who came to Georgia. He said, "Oh yes, we have his estate papers." And he pulled them out, and he had died without a will.
And in the state papers, it listed two boys in Georgia as heirs of the state because their father was dead.
And it said, "Melanchton B. and William S. Johnson, sons of William S. Johnson, deceased."
And I thought, "Well, I thought their father was Melanchton." And then it hit me like a ton of bricks. No, he wasn't their father. My grandfather's father was the second brother.
And he must have had the gravestone made in New York and brought it to Georgia. Because the gravestone in Twiggs County looks just like the gravestone in the Presbyterian Church Cemetery in Cambridge, New York.
So anyway, to make a long story short, I've now traced my Johnson ancestry back to England.
And I want to go there next March and go to the town my immigrant ancestor came from. My immigrant Johnson ancestor was named William Johnson. He was a Puritan. He came to Charlestown, Massachusetts, with a wife and one child by 1634.
The information I had said that he came from a different place in Kent. And I went there on a previous trip and couldn't find anything. But now I've found he came from a different place in Bedfordshire. So I'm going there next spring.
But then with the rest of the family lines, I haven't had as much success because there was so many burned county courthouses. The Twiggs County Courthouse burned down in 1901, destroying all records. So I didn't know the name of my grandfather's grandmother.
The marriage records were gone and her name wasn't on anything else except we found where she had drawn a land lot in the gold lottery of 1832. And it listed Elizabeth Johnson Whittle.
And then also from the same district in Twiggs County were William S. Johnson's orphans. So that pretty much proves her name had to be Elizabeth.
My grandfather had said her name was Henrietta and that was wrong. So when you have oral histories, you always have some fact but a lot of errors. And so in genealogy, you try to find the original records whenever you can.
I'm working on a manuscript now that a cousin in West Point did in the 1970s on her branch of the family. Her maiden name was Loveless.
And she did such a good job on it. I thought it ought to be published. So I'm editing it and adding to it and I'm finding more descendants now on websites like ancestry.com, findagrave.com, familysearch.org. You can find so much on the computer now.
And if I live long enough, I'm gonna publish it. I've already published several articles about things I've found in other places. Well, I haven't done any original research that I published. Everything I've published has been collections of things I've copied from SunHoyo [???]. But it's fascinating. Genealogy is like detective work. You never get tired of it once you get into it.
And what was the motivation about the obituary?
Well, I did so much newspaper research. On the Georgia Archives website, you can find old Georgia newspapers going back to 1763 and there's no charge for it. Anybody can do it. You can read history when it was happening.
So I got to noticing all these, looking up obituaries for my family. I noticed several interesting reports of deaths, like accidental deaths mainly, also murders and suicides. And I started collecting them. And when I told my friends about them, they said, "Hey, you ought to make a book out of this." So during the pandemic, I just collected as many of these stories of gruesome, horrible deaths that I could find and put them together in a book. And I found a book publisher in Alpharetta, Georgia. So that was convenient. I could go up there and meet with them in person. So, you know, I put it together in a manuscript and we went back and forth editing it. And I had somebody index it for me. That was the hardest part. But the daughter of a well-known genealogist indexed it for me, well, she'd done so much of it.
So I had to pay to have it published. And I've just marketed it wherever I could, just telling people about it and passing out brochures. Most bookstores won't order it. They have their own set little things that they order and the person they order from. And, you know, I can't sell it to bookstores very well, but I sell it. Well, we're having a Christmas Bazaar where I live. And I'm gonna sell it there.
And I just tell people about it and pass out handouts. You can order it from amazon or barnsandnoble.com.
What are some of your favorite deaths?
Well, one I really liked is a circus parade in Valdosta in 1902. And the elephant keeper was drunk. And he was riding on the head of the elephant. And he fell off and the elephant stepped on him. Well, then the crowd went berserk and they started chasing the elephant out of town and they finally shot it. But I thought that was a very unusual way to die.
Then another one was a black man fishing on the Okmulgee River. And he had the line tied around his big toe. And he got drowned by a 38 pound catfish.
The way these are worded in the 1800s, they go into great detail. And I think people must have enjoyed reading them like the tabloids of that day.
What was the one with the spider webs?
Yeah, a man in Mississippi found that spider web balls were good for curing cold or something. So he ate some of these spider web balls and he had spiders crawling around in his stomach or something like that. Anyway, he died from it.
These have to be unusual deaths to be in the book. I had to leave out a lot of them. I tried to make them all in Georgia, but there was some that was so good that took place in other states. I had to put them in. But anybody who just died of a normal disease didn't get in the book.
Any in your family or any of those?
I found two that are related to me, distantly. One of them was a man named James Jernigan. And he was probably, I think it was about a first cousin of my great, great, great grandmother, something great, great grandmother, something like that. But he just went out to shoot a squirrel. And as he shot the squirrel, he felt a sudden pain in his head and dropped dead.
And then another one was a man named J.B. Oliver in South Georgia. And he was out trying to flag down a train. And the train ran over him. I don't know how that happened, but it did.
Was it alcohol, too?
Well, there were several men who got drunk and laid down on the railroad tracks to sleep. Of course, they could have been murdered and put on the railroad tracks to cover it up. That's always a possibility.
I like to read murder mysteries, Agatha Christie, mainly. The good old fashioned kind where you have a big house and a stormy night and a butler and secret rooms. It's the best kind of murder mystery.
I bet this place in the middle of the night has lends itself, too.
It does get a little uncomfortable. I don't stay out here by myself anymore.
A little silent in the night.
Is there a fortune teller around this area? Yeah, now that's part of the story of murder in Coweta County. John Wallace killed a tenant farmer to get even with him about something. And he dumped the body in a well. And then he got two black men to help him haul it out. He decided that wasn't a good idea. He needed to get rid of the body so there was nothing left of it. So they took it down to his liquor still and burned it. He pulled away anything left and shoveled the ashes in the creek.
But they missed two little pieces of bone. That's what convicted him.
Well, the sheriff of Coweta County was determined to prosecute, but he needed to find evidence of a body. So he went to a fortune teller in Heard County. Her name was Miss Mayhayley Lancaster. And she was a character. She was a psychic and a fortune teller and she had the gift. And people would come to her to get the fortune sold.
She lived out in the shack in the middle of nowhere with a half-witted sister Sally. And she was very eccentric. She dressed in her brother's World War I Army cap and jacket and combat boots and a long black skirt. And she was blind in one eye and wore red marble in that eye socket.
And people say she was scary. She charged a dollar and 10 cents for people who came to see her. A dollar for the fortune, 10 cents for dog food. She kept a pack of dogs. And she'd sit in front of the fire and poke the grate and go into a trance. And when she came out of it, she'd tell you what she saw. But if she saw something bad in your future, she'd clam up and give you a money back. And one girl she did, that too got killed in the car wreck the next week.
And there's been a book written about her that's available at the Troup County Archives called Oracle of the Ages. And apparently she taught herself to read law and she was a practicing lawyer and she'd sue somebody every week just for the hell of it.
But the sheriff came to see her and she went into the trance and she said, "The body's done been burned.” And the sheriff finally figured out that it had to be at John Wallace's liquor still and he dug around and found two little pieces of bone in the ashes. And he had the black men put in jail first. I don't know how he found out about them. I think somebody told on them. But he put them in jail in Columbus so they couldn't be killed. And then he arrested John Wallace and charged him with murder.
And it was a sensational trial. Celestine Sibley came to it and everybody testified and they found him guilty and he got the electric chair. And it's been made into a movie that you can order from Amazon on DVD. And you can't guess who played John Wallace, the murderer. Andy Griffith. And Johnny Cash played the sheriff.
I remember seeing the picture of the matchbox and the two little pieces of bone on the front page of the Atlanta Journal when I was eight years old.
And then after John Wallace was convicted and awaiting his execution, they had an auction to sell all his property. And that's when his farm pond dam broke after a heavy rain storm and washed away the bridge on Flat Shoals Creek.
Do you think it was a flood involved or was there some sort of vandalism involved?
No, apparently it was a rain storm that made the back pond dam give way. Unusually heavy rain.
Talk about the Garland family?
I can't tell you about them. I've got to stay on good terms with Ed Garland. His family is a very old family in Troup County.
And there's some interesting stories connected with it. One of his relatives back in the 1800s was Alexander Means who married a Winston.
The Winston family, Ed's ancestors. And Alexander Means was a self-taught professor at Emory College in Oxford, Georgia. He had very little education. And Means Hall at Emory University is named after him. Well, he was born in North Carolina and he became a school teacher and a preacher. And the only education he had was just reading, writing, and arithmetic at home and a few years in a whole school. But then he went to Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, rode a horse up there and stayed long enough to get a medical degree. So he was a doctor and a preacher and a teacher. And he was particularly interested in physics. He went to Europe and met Michael Faraday and Sir Charles Lyle and other scientists. And he came back to Oxford, Emory College and experimented in physics demonstrations. And he actually invented a working electric light bulb before Edison was even born. But he couldn't do anything with it. He didn't have a permanent source of power. The only power at that time was steam engines. Petroleum hadn't been discovered in America yet. This was in the 1850s. But he didn't do anything with his invention. So Edison got the credit.
Alexander Means was a genius, but he never took any credit for his work. And his wife was a Winston. And then Ed's mother was a very interesting person and that's all I'll say.
Have you talked history with Ed?
He has a diary that the Winston family kept back in the Civil War period. On the plantation, you know, plantation records and a diary. And it's in the Cobb Memorial Archives that Ed retains the ownership of it. He's not giving it to the archives permanently.
Miss Fauntleroy left all her property and trust to her grandchildren. Ed and Reuben Jr. are not able to do anything with it themselves legally, as I understand it. As Reuben Jr. said, Miss Fauntleroy was a mighty headstrong person. She was determined to have her way. And that was Ed's mother? Ed's mother was named Fauntleroy. She was named after an aunt who died at age 19 of measles.
Would your great, great, great have kept a plantation diary?
Not that I know of, but I do have a diary that was kept by my grandmother's aunt in South Georgia in Dooley County. And I have that diary and I'm trying to decide what is the best place to put it. Well, it really needs to be in that central Georgia area, Washington Memorial Library in Macon, maybe. But they've got so much in their archives that they haven't been able to process,
but at least it would be protected there. But this is just a plain little book.
And this aunt didn't have any children. She was married to a farmer. And she wrote in her book every Saturday. She'd sit down and write what she did during the week. And it shows how a typical farm house life lived. Monday I washed, Tuesday I ironed, Wednesday I made a cake, so and so came over and helped me quilt. And they'd tell about the church and who died and who was sick and who had a baby. So it's a lot of interesting little history. And that's what makes genealogy fun, is when you can see people as real people.
I'm a member of the Georgia Salzburg Society. And I don't know whether you've heard of them or not. Georgia had a German colony in the early days of the colony. And I'm putting together a PowerPoint presentation about them to show to the SAR chapter. And I've never done anything like that before, but we need to educate people about the Salzburg colony. It started in 1731, the Bishop of Salzburg kicked out all the Lutherans, told them to convert to Catholicism or get out.
Two hundred of them came to Georgia. Oglethorpe found out about them and invited them to Georgia and gave them land on the Savannah River, upstream from Savannah. And he knew that he needed them because they were all skilled workers. They were carpenters, brick masons, blacksmiths. They were skilled at farming and animal raising. And they contributed a lot to the development of Savannah and the early history of Georgia. And then the Revolutionary War hit them. The British invaded the town, burned it all, but left the church. They have a beautiful brick church. And the town was called Ebenezer. It's a dead town now, but it is on the map.
And the Lutheran church has a retreat center there. And the old church built in 1769 is still there and it's still an active congregation. And they have a weekend, every Labor Day, they have a weekend of German heritage with the German music concerts and exhibits and the museum open and church services of Trolley Tour of Savannah. Well, it's a really interesting weekend. Good way to spend Labor Day.
And so I joined the Georgia Salzburg Society because my grandmother knew, in West Point, knew she had Salzburg ancestors, but she didn't know the connection. Her father had told her that. He remembered seeing his grandmother reading her German Bible.
So her maiden name was Miller. And now they've published all the Salzburg records. They kept such good records that we know everything about them, all the little details. The preacher had to keep a journal of what was going on in the community and report back to England and Germany. And we know everything about them. Every detail is fascinating.
How far outside Savannah?
It's about 30 miles north of Savannah. It's in Effingham County.
When you go to England and Mars, are you hoping to extend the genealogy?
I hope I can find some more Johnson ancestors back there. And then I'm going to go to several other places where I know I have other ancestors. On my trip two years ago, I went to Oxburg Hall, which is the home of the Bedding Fields. Well, this grandmother, my grandfather's grandmother was a Beddingfield. So I went to Oxburg Hall to see what I could find out. It's in Norfolk. And the temperature was 100 degrees when I was there.
But I found out so Henry Beddingfield still lives in Oxburg Hall. And they said, "Oh, you might be able to get in to speak to him." So I did. I got in to meet him and made friends with him. I have an English Lord for genealogy pen pal now. But the Beddingfield family of Oxburg Hall were all Catholics.
And my Beddingfield ancestors in Virginia had to have been Protestants because Virginia didn't allow Catholics in colonial days. So he told me there was another branch of the family that split off way back when. And they were in another town called Ditchingham. So I got to go there too.
Have you ever had any big parties out here?
I had an 80th birthday party for my mother. She was suffering from cancer and didn't feel too good. And she didn't want a big crowd. So we had the family members one day. And it was May 23rd. And the spider lilies were blooming at their peak.
So we had the family members one day. And then she wanted to invite her Sunday school class and a few special friends the other day. Well, somehow the word got out and people thought it was an open invitation. And people were crashing that party. But I didn't want to be here. So that backfired on me.
I know so many people appreciate how you open this to the public every day on the weekends.
Yeah, I plan to still do it. I told Michael that was part of his obligation when he bought the cabin. It had to be somebody who was a dedicated environmentalist who could work with the Nature Conservancy. I couldn't advertise it through a real estate agent.
I would not do. And that's what the nature conservancy might've done if I'd just died and left it to nature conservancy.
…
My grandmother and my great-grandmother all went to LaGrange College.
My aunt went there in 1918 to 1922 and one of the required courses for graduation was sight singing. And my aunt, Laura Francis, could not carry a tune and a bucket. And she told this on herself. Every girl in the class was given a piece of music and had to stand up in front of the class and read it and sing it. And when it came her time to sing, she said the other girls would fall out of the chair and crack up. So the teacher gave her the alto part on the church in the wildwood, just one note. She couldn't even handle that.
Finally the dean called her in her office and said since she had such a full schedule, they would waive that requirement for graduation.
…
Can you find out much information about the moonshiners back in the day?
Well there's a book that a woman in Columbus who has Harris County roots wrote a book called The Family Tree. You might get a copy of it. I think I ordered it, I don't know, well I got it at Amazon I guess. It's called The Family Tree and it's about these families in troop county, in Harris County, that were involved in a lynching. There was a lynching where a bunch of black people were lynched. One of them was a woman and they were scapegoats apparently. And there were these moonshining families connected with it. She mentions the names of four different moonshining families and tells a little bit about the genealogy album.
Apparently the Davidson family and the Hubbard family, on Drummond Road, Highway 18, the Big Moonshiners. I'm half related to the Davidsons.
What can you say about the Davidsons?
Well, nothing good. Benjamin Johnson married a widow with two children. One of those children was Lucretia Leveritt and his wife's first husband was a Leveritt. And Lucretia Leveritt married a large Davidson. So they're the founders of the dynasty of the Davidsons. There are a lot of them. Hal Avery over here at the High Mountain is related to the Davidsons. His grandmother was a Davidson. There's a Davidson genealogy in the Cobb Archives and the Troup Archives. So that will tell you everything you want to know about the Davidsons. Congressman Drew Ferguson's mother, grandmother, was a Davidson. So I'm related to him, unfortunately. I do not like him. I don't mind saying that.
You talked about the Black Davidsons. Are we talking about the enslaved people?
Yeah. Now, I wrote an article for the Georgia Genealogical Society Quarterly about slave birth dates found in two family Bibles. One of them was the Davidson Bible. And it listed all the slaves of the last Davidson when they were born. And then the other one was Benjamin Johnson's slaves in that Bible. And so, you know, that's valuable information for African-Americans who are trying to trace their genealogy.
There was a Billingsley family down the road here on Pine Lake Road. There was a Billingsley plantation. And Benjamin Johnson's youngest sister married a Billingsley. And he was apparently very wealthy and owned a lot of slaves. And there are a lot of Billingsleys in West Point still. And I had a black man named Billingsley call me up from New York asking me what I knew. And I said, "I don't know anything." And I never heard anything about that branch of the family except how they were related to us and that they were very rich.
So the old Billingsley house was still there up until recent years. And I asked somebody what happened to it. Apparently, they moved it to Westfield. But Westfield didn't open to the public anymore. So I don't know what's going on with it.
