My 80 Years in Atlanta
Chapters 1-5

---Introduction by Publisher----- (Website Historians Note : There is no official publication information)

The greatest way to build a future is to use aright the lessons of the past. A people which fails to regard its past will have no future. These sentiments have been expressed by some of the greatest and wisest men of old - Atlanta is indeed fortunate to have in the personality of Miss Huff an individual who not only remembers the reconstruction period and the scenes of the Civil War but whose parents have preserved many of the letters written during that period and have handed them down to her.

She has jealously guarded not only the memories of the past, but these precious manuscripts which help to make up a vivid account of the scenes of Civil War days and the reconstruction period. That she still lives with us to give us the impression of the heroism of those days is a blessing to the childhood and the youth of Atlanta. The articles which Miss Huff has written have been used in the Atlanta Public Schools in working out our activity program. They have constituted a real contribution to the history of the past and an inspiration to our youth for future achievements.

It is with great pleasure that we present them in pamphlet form to be preserved for the use of future generations. We acknowledge with grateful appreciation the courtesy of the Atlanta Journal and the gracious kindness of Miss Huff in allowing this publication, and we hope that this series of articles will be of tremendous value to the Atlanta Public Schools, to historians of the future and to the coming generation in preserving the traditions and heritages of the South.

My name is Sarah Huff. I am the daughter of Jeremiah and Elizabeth Norton Huff.
I was born here in my ancestral home, 'Huff House, May the 9th, 1856.
History-minded and a lover of adventure, few other Atlanta children were ever born at a time so opportune.
Being born just when I was gave me a chance to know real happenings taking place in and around Atlanta during the sixties, the most important epoch in the town's century of progress.

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I have lived my eighty years in Atlanta. I was born on May 9, 1856, in Huff House, which is still standing at 70 Huff road, just off Marietta Street and nor very far from Howell's Station. Huff House has changed little since it was built in 1855, upon the foundations of an older building dating from 1830.

I have lived there all my life with the exception of four months in 1864 when my family refugeed to Social Circle.I have seen Atlanta in ashes, and I have watched it grow to its present size.

Now I am writing about the city as I have known it.

One of my most vivid recollections dates back to the time when I was five years old. An excited neighbor rushed over from an adjoining plantation and exclaimed to my mother ''Oh, Mrs. Huff, Fort Sumter has fallen!"

There in the garden they talked and cried as if it meant that something very serious had taken place.

Never having heard of Fort Sumter, I wondered what it was all about, and became more interested than ever when mother blew the trumpet for father to come to the house from the field.

I was anxious to learn what it was that had gotten a fall, and why my father and mother and Mrs. Oliver kept saying so much about war. Then came the neighbors to "sit till bedtime," as an evening call was described.

Everyone was excited. Years passed before I found out who "Jeff Davis" and "Abe Lincoln" were.

Across the many years another vivid scene comes back to me.

This time I see my mother's long dining table piled high with gray woolen cloth. Little thought I, the wondering child, that the color of that cloth would be remembered in song and story far down the ages.

Around that table stood my father, my uncle and aunt, A and Mrs. John Floyd Huff, and their 18-yearold son William who with my father, Jerry Huff, had enlisted in Cobb's Legion, (Cavalry), Company B.

With weeping eyes the others were watching my mother, who in an expert way was cutting the cloth to be made into waist length jackets and long trousers for my father and his boyish rosy-cheeked nephew to wear to the war.

Unlike the Union soldiers, the Southerners had to their own uniforms which were usually hand-woven an stitched by the women of the family. Sewing machines were unknown here.

My weeping mother and my aunt began basting and fitting the uniforms for father and Willie, but why so much crying?

Taking the question to black mammy, my unfailing source of information, I was told that "Everybody would have to the war and get kilt!" Which scared me so that I out cried all my weeping elders.

With black mammy's description of what happened to the going to the war ever in my memory, it can well be imagine that I was in terror when father had to bid us farewell and leave us, perhaps forever.

All dressed up in his new uniform of Confederate gray, joined his nephew and several other lifetime friends and broken-hearted at having to leave us, went up to "Big Shanty" on the State Road, to be in training camp for a short time before starting over the mountains and through the wonderful Shenandoah Valley to Virginia.

Their horses were fresh and prancing to go. Father's war horse was worn and tired when father got home to stay April 26, 1865.

Daguerreotypes aid childhood memory in bringing to sign and mind features of these long-gone loved ones. Before his departure father and mother and all the children had their pictures taken. His alone, the others group around mother, who was seated. Many a time have I come on mother weeping over that earnest face and manly figure.

The case containing the likenesses of his family went with father into terrible battles and through swiftly flowing rivers.

When his special comrade and near neighbor, while they were fording the Shenandoah River, was washed down stream and drowned, father by the merest chance escaped with his life when his horse also lost his power to stem the force of the rushing waters.

The knapsack containing the treasured pictures of his wife and children by a strange freak of good fortune, was cast ashore and after several days found and sent to Captain Juhan. He restored them to father and they are now my most highly prized mementoes.

How eagerly the war-time letters were awaited, and what bitter tears were shed when they failed to come. Those that did get here, sometimes after several weeks' delay, were sacredly treasured and reverently read, even to this day.

In one I read: "Camp near Madison Courthouse, November, 1862. Cobb's Legion has been in several fights, our men are trying to bag the Yankees; we are tolling them on while Jackson brings up the rear." Later my father was courier for Stonewall Jackson, and as long as he lived was proud of the words of praise spoken to him by General Robert E. Lee when an extremely important message had been safely delivered. One of the bullets given him fired at father when he refused a command to halt, by five Federal soldiers, went through his hat.

In this package of over-seventy-year-old letters many and close calls are mentioned, and many adventures are described. The wheels of industry, the spinning wheel, the reel and the winding blades moved swiftly in my mother's wartime household. Being too young to use them, I was not allowed to tamper with or to turn them. I had just as well have climbed upon a chair and done something to mother's Chauncey Jerome clock as to have turned the wheels of her textile machinery.

On winter days, as on rainy days, the looms were forever in motion. Many a time my young head had a bumping without a thought of punishment. Eager to see, I was forever getting in the way of the beam, battern or whatever it was that the weaver was knocking the thread into place with. She wouldn't know I was about until my strenuous howls would carry the news abroad that a head had been bumped in the loom house.

My recollection is that grown-up people rested from their labors only after they had wound the clock, covered the coals in the big fireplace and blown out the candles on the, to me, unreachable mantelpiece.

When father had to leave home there were the inhabitants of ten beehives to be kept in subjection, and so when we heard a roaring noise overhead, like the sound of an airplane today, we saw an air force, comparable in numbers to what we may live to see flying over us.

That uproar called for quick action. Every child and every darkey on the place, after first protecting their faces with thin cloth masks and wearing home-knit gloves on their hands, grabbed dinner horns, tin plates, dishpans and mother's 3-foot-long tin trumpet and whanged and blew and banged for dear life.

Had there been any Jericho walls in the neighborhood they would surely have fallen.

Mother and our oldest brothers, veiled and gloved, stood by the big new beegum ready to gather the runaway bees gently into it. When the bees flew high we knew they meant to fly over the fields and settle in some tall tree that towered in the forest a mile behind Huff House. However, attracted by the noise, they usually decided to go back to where they came from or they settled on some convenient object.

 

On one occasion Grandpa, who had been an invalid for many years, had been brought to us from his home on a nearby hill. He happened to be spending the day with us when a swarm of young bees decided to go to housekeeping, or rather gumkeeping, for themselves.

Grandpa had been assisted into a big, comfortable rocking chair, which he had placed in the shade of the well shelter. He was enjoying the excitement when all at once the bees decided to make a landing and began to settle on the well windlass within two feet of grandpa's elbow.

He had asserted that he was not afraid and objected to being protected when he wished to be carried into the danger zone. Now he jumped up, and, as has many another brave man, he took to his heels and ran as though a whole army were after him.

But mother always wondered why Grandpa grabbed that big, heavy rocking chair and ran to the house with it clasped in his arms.

Decided changes in our immediate neighborhood began to, take place very early in the war. For one thing our Scottish next door neighbor put up a button factory right there in sight of us, The object was to furnish bone buttons for clothing worn by soldiers of the Southern Confederacy.

Never having seen anything of that kind it was a wonderful sight to me as I would, with older children, watch those button cutters come down on the thinly sliced bones. It was said to have been the most extensive button factory in the south.

Another thing that proved to be very interesting, indeed, was when the old Benjamin Thurman pioneer homestead was bought by Dextor Niles, of Boston, Mass., and turned into a slave plantation, or maybe it was a wholesale slave market. We had never seen so many dark skinned people in all our lives. Perhaps two years went by and then all at once the residence was vacated and all the cabins were bare.

 

It was said that when it became evident that the institution of slavery was doomed these bondmen, women and children, were rushed to a slave market beyond the shores to the south of us and sold before Confederate money entirely lost its value.

Dextor Niles went back to Boston, but the name he bore goes down in history as the owner of the home wherein the "Transfer" took place when General Joseph E. Johnston was replaced by General John B. Hood in command of the defensive army.

The Cook place, on the Marietta Road, also within a quarter of a mile of Huff House, was bought by a man named Whitehead, who, in number of slaves and elegance of gardens, rivaled the Ponders, of almost national renown. Orange trees by the score were grown in sunken tubs in the orchards, and the rarest of plants and flowers beautified the gardens. Without a moment's notice the premises were vacated and the family and soon-to-be-freed slaves gone forever.

When or before the war ended the house was torn from under its roof which later, sitting on the ground, made unusual kennel for the wild and vicious dogs which slept during most of the daytime when they were hiding from home-coming refugees in the early days of 1865.

 

 

 

Chapter 2

To young people of the present time "cornshelling night" doesn't signify, anything at all. But to me it links my memory to some -of the happiest scenes of my childhood.

A great sheet, made for the purpose, was spread over the floor of the sitting room, and several baskets of earcorn poured it. Then every member of the household, regardless of age, size or color, seated themselves on the floor around it. And the fun began.

Who could find the greatest number of red ears, and who could shell the biggest pile of corn?

On one never-to-be-forgotten occasion, because the others couldn't be spared from the field, mother allowed me to go with her to mill. Over hill and dale we wended our way to Thomas Moore's famous war-time grist mill, far down Peachtree Creek, in hearing of the "Song of the Chattahoochee." The rule of a mill, as of a bank, is first come, first served. So everyone went prepared for a long wait, and passed the time chatting with old neighbors and friends. My mother, taking her knitting out of her pocket, seated herself on a beach in the shade of a big water oak in the mill yard.

A woman, whom mother said must be a new-comer to the neighborhood, got her meal and placing her hands on her side-saddle, landed with one jump on the back of her big white mule. A lady of that day was not supposed to let her ankles seen, and mother and the other women present turned their heads. But mother said the half dozen old men who had their corn in the millhouse ready to grind, gazed right at the unusual sight.

The Miller, holding the bridle, told the rider to be careful white mules were mean, and that that mule had a bad streak. She informed him that she had never seen a mule or man that she couldn't manage. Placing the big sack of meal as securely as possible on the back of the saddle, the miller added stronger words of caution.

The white mule with the mean eye began to try to do some stunting himself. Placing his head between his front legs, he gave the horrified watchers such an exhibition of jumping, kicking and bucking as none of them had ever seen before.

The woman's hat and meal spilled over the mill yard, and she got mad as a hatter because the old miller said, "I told you so.

Corn was inherited from the Indians centuries ago. I have friends from Iowa, the greatest corn-growing section in the world, who never saw any cornbread until they came to Georgia. Friends from Chicago, New York and Washington, D. C., tell me that other kinds of breadstuffs are used. Fortunately, southern people have always been fond of cornbread. Colored folks even, now prefer it to any other type of bread. The manner of cooking was known as hoecake, pones and dodgers. The Scottish ancestors of some of our mountaineers were responsible for the name "dodger." But the-corn meal of which these dodgers were made was purely an American product.

When father had to go to fight for the south, my mother, who was the most executive-minded woman I have ever known, became the major general of the farm forces and commander in chief of the home guards. Her field forces consisted only of her two sons, an orphan boy whom she was bringing up, and Charlotte's "old man" and two sons.

Corn was a vital crop to the southern people, and very early they began to suffer the consequences of depleted farm forces. Then came the battle of the cornfields, and the war mothers became the captains of industry in the great struggle for bread. It was impossible to buy anything. Each family had to be absolutely independent. In those hard fights for bread it was victory or starvation.

We also raised sugar cane, from which came the "long sweetening" used in our parched-corn coffee. Long sweetening was also a breakfast favorite. We ate it with hot biscuits when we had any, and with corn dodgers when the home-raised wheat flour gave out.

Wheat grew on the uplands, but corn, the main crop, was raised on the hillsides and the creek bottoms. The creek was Woodall, and Huff Spring is its source.

We could have raised plenty of wheat, but getting wheat thrashed was another matter. The neighbors who formerly brought their traveling thrashing machines around to our house and thrashed father's wheat, were his comrades in the ranks of Cobb's Legion (Cavalry), Company B, in Virginia, where General R6bert E. Lee's thrashing machines were trying their very best to thrash the rest of the nation.

To shuck corn was a very simple matter. The boys and the slave man and his boys sat in the corncrib and shucked corn on rainy days.

During the years of father's war service his annual corn shuckings and mother's all-day quiltings were suspended. Friends and neighbors from the time of my earliest recollection came to these double parties. As the old saying expressed it "the big pot and the little one" were put in operation for both dinner and supper.

These southern institutions, so much enjoyed by the people of every farming community, were resumed when the farmers returned from the war and began gathering their corn crops.

One thing never came back like it was. That was the "cornshucking songs" of the slaves as they sang them before the war. I was too young to remember them, but father and mother said no melody could be sweeter.

Never was a southern battle, wrestled from the opposing forces of depression and despair, more victoriously ended. We never suffered one pang of hunger, we were never cold for the want of warm clothing, while that three-years-long battle was being fought.

I was a child then, but those battles for bread which took place on the banks of Woodall Creek made an impression on me that time has never effaced. My mother and all those faithful fighters are gone, now-those soldiers who wrung a living from the soil have returned to the dust from whence they came. And I, alone, have lived to tell of these unsung heroes and those battlefields unmarked except by the threatened invasion of the oncoming Gate City of the South.

 

For me the kindergarten age came and went, and no school to go to, but as to being taught by diverting object lessons, no child living today had my opportunity. And no child of today ever had a better or kinder teacher than I had in the almost helpless, chair-confined lady relative who lived in mother's house and so patiently taught me. Children of that period, or even years after the war, knew nothing of free schools, though free schools had been in use more than a hundred years in northern and northwestern states.

Owing to the many years of delay in getting public schools I never went to school a day in my life that father didn't pay for. And in most instances the school houses were those built by my father and his neighbors at their own expense.

My mother's indulgence in allowing me to go with her gave me opportunities to see and hear things that otherwise I would not have known of. In that way I treasure recollections of a dinner at Whitehall Tavern, as well as a morning spent with the Leyden children playing in their nursery in the historic Leyden House. My first and only visit to the old Courthouse where the Capitol now stands, is a remembrance that's yet with me. While mother paid the taxes brother and I, peeping into a vacant office, watched some halfgrown boys draw lifesized grotesque pictures on the walls.

 

 

 

Chapter 3

A few weeks before the main Army of Tennessee retreated to the south of the Chattahoochee this section was infested by men who claimed to belong to the Confederate army, but many of them were unworthy to bear the name of soldier in any army. They respected the property rights of no one.

While my father was fighting in far-away Virginia his property, as that of many another Georgia soldier, was at the mercy of robbers who claimed to have a right to whatever would aid maintenance or supply individual craving. Father and his comrades fighting for home and native land, fought in vain.

These marauders, calling themselves soldiers, and wearing ragged gray garments, killed and skinned mother's two hogs intended by her for the next year's bacon, which was a vital item of family supply.

Mother had her bee gums carried above-stairs, where the busy bees went right on with their business; going to their work through the small old-fashioned windows. Their honeyladened wings bringing them back the same way.

A convalescent soldier boy whom mother was taking care of 'robbed" the bee-gums for her on the night before she refugeed.

To save her chickens mother had them brought into her bedroom. There chicken-housed in a big covered basket, they proceeded to lay eggs, crow, cackle and cluck to their yellow-legged brood. And like the bees above them, made the best they could of a very unfamiliar environment.

The mules, very small and very black, answering, with a "heehaw, " to names of "Beck" and "Kit " were with Mike the buggy horse, stabled in the old log-built smoke house. In that way the were saved to draw mother and her family on a most adventurous itinerary. Returning when the war was over to be temporarily housed in the same old structure, where for generations the hams, shoulders and other parts of porkers intended for the family's meat supply had been cured in waves of hickory smoke.

 

When mother's hogs were killed by these unsoldierly "army scalawags," as they were called, with tears in her eyes she remonstrated with the killers; only to be told that if they didn't take them the Yankees would.

 

She replied that they were "laying the Yankees a poor pattern. "

 

A few weeks went by and the pattern, poor or otherwise, was followed by one of General Sherman's young soldiers, as the invaders passed through Cobb county. A chicken was being chased by the young man, and its owner, one of the most highly respected and most aristocratic old ladies in that whole section, ordered him to let it alone. The rooster ran under the house, and the young man in blue started to crawl under the building after it. Said the old lady to the disobeying youth, "If you don't come out from there I shall kill you." Half way under the house, he would not pull his head and shoulders back.

Grabbing up a scantling, the old lady let him have it on the small of his back. To her extreme consternation she found that her threat had been carried out. The blue-coated Yankee boy was dead.

The captain, who had seemed to enjoy the old lady's effort to save her chicken, but would not help her, now came to her rescue. She was not even arrested.

This account of this tragic war-time episode was given to me by a particular friend of my family now deceased. She was one of Atlanta's most excellent and highly-esteemed citizens.

The old lady who killed the soldier was her grandmother.

 

 

 

Chapter 4

When the artillery division reached Marietta Road, on its departure from Huff House, General Joseph E. Johnston's forces were passing and Major Hotchkiss rushed his cannonaders into line.

The Army of Tennessee was either in retreat or was on its way to occupy its prepared defenses around Atlanta. Colonel L. P. Grant had been the fortification engineer, and the citizens of the city had helped in the work of digging ditches and making breastworks and forts. The tired warriors found every thing ready, and, on account of the unusual construction of these defenses, held their ground for many weeks of hard fighting.

There was no pomp in that parade. The sound of flute and fife and drum was not heard. When the war was new every battle or every march wag fought or stepped to the strains of martial music.

On one occasion, in the fighting around Richmond, an irate captain ordered one of my father's old neighbors and comrades who happened to be a bandmaster, to "Take that damn band to the rear!"

The roar of a big army in motion is different from other noises in that many sounds combine to make a big racket. Cavalry, infintry, artillery, noise of wagon trains, giving of commands by officers, cracking of whips by wagon drivers, stepping of thousands of men in unison, and the tramping of thousands of horses and mules is like pandemonium let loose.

For two days we spent most of each day at the front gate looking and listening while 45,000 Confederate soldiers marched by on Marietta Street, just across the railroad and the valley from Huff House.

General Johnston came several days in advance of his army and established headquarters in the Dextor Niles home, within a quarter of a mile of our house. Mr. Niles had already rushed his 300 slaves to a far-away island market, sold them and returned to his former home in Boston, Massachusetts.

On the night of July 17, 1864, a great historical drama was staged at the general's headquarters. The soldiers, who were sitting with mother on her front porch, or strolling through the yards and gardens, had told mother that something extremely important was impending.

This occasion, known in history as "The Transfer," came right home to mother and me, out on our front porch. Mother a lover of music, said that the music of the military bands on that brilliant moonlight night was the sweetest she ever heard. I, who stood by mother's chair, have always thought of that lovely moonlight night whenever I have heard music on a beautiful summer evening.

Pathos was furnished by the weeping and angry soldiers, as they strolled about mother's front yard, and told her and each other of the despair they felt on account of the approaching discharge of their idolized commander, General Joseph E. Johnston.

The music over the way became more lively, and mingled with strains of "Dixie" came the rhythmic sound of dancing feet. The wives and lady friends of some of the officers were visiting headquarters and, as is usual with army people, even if comes a Waterloo tomorrow, there is a sound of revelry by night.

At midnight when the old Atlanta watchman's voice rang out: "Twelve o'clock, and all's well!" the clear-hearing statesmen of the Southland heard the doom bells ringing the death knell of the Southern Confederacy.

Some writers have persisted in giving a wrong date for the Battle of Peachtree Creek. Not having been in the near vicinity of the encounter, they are not supposed to be impressed like those of us who were within the danger zone.

For weeks we had listened to the nearer coming rumblings of exploding bomb-shells, so remindful sometimes of slowly approaching thunderstorms.

Our awe returns when the fury of a thunder storm has passed and some one says: "The cloud is coming back.".

All at once in the early forenoon of July 20, 1864, the expected storm broke over us. Within one mile of where mother and members of her family stood, trees as big as a mans body were mowed down. Mount Zion Baptist Church, school houses and numerous dwellings, slave quarters, and farms were demolished.

The reports of the cannon sounded like thunder claps and the musketry was like hail on the roof in the time of a summer flurry squall. I recall hearing my brother say, "If they turn their guns this way we will be torn all to pieces!"

We were on the edge of the battlefield, which extended several miles around the northeastern line of the city. For mother and her children that was a fateful day. She refused to entertain the slightest idea of leaving her home. All the neighbors except George Edwards, the button factory proprietor, whose plant had shut down, had been gone for weeks. He was the loyal friend who later saved mothers house from burning by doing the same as he did for his own---running up the British flag over it.

On account of the coming and going of soldiers all around us, and also from the fact that headquarters was in plain view, we knew of some of the happenings over there. General Johnston didn't go away as soon as General Hood had superseded him but remained at his headquarters at least a day and a night. The soldiers said General Hood was in conference with General Johnston three times during the Battle of Peachtree Creek.

Although the fight lasted less than one day, the havoc wrought by its fury continued to show for more than a quarter of a century.

The war-wounds were then healed by being covered by elegant homes and beautiful flower gardens of Atlanta's leading citizens.

The eventfulness of the conflict to mother and family dawned on her early next morning. She had determined that she had a right to stay at home and try to save the house that she and my father had in 1855 erected on the foundations of a big log house built in 1830. She had bought the property in 1847, and it bad been been home ever since. During the years of her widowhood she had had lived there with her three young children and Charlotte, the slave girl, who became the wonderful black mammy of my day.

No, she didn't intend to leave her beloved home at the mercy of the "scalawags" or despoilers. For some reason she didn't expect coming battles or the passing into offensive positions of the invading army of one hundred and eleven thousand men.

But on they came.

The morning of the day following the battle fortification officers came, and after laying off a line of battle between the "big house" and the thirty-foot-away log kitchen, commanded my weeping mother to leave immediately. They explained that the next day would bring the battling right to her door, and that those who would then try to help her could not do so.

That made a believer of her, even if it was a false alarm. Long lines of breastworks lined and wound about the estate, but if even a skirmish was ever engaged in on it we never found it out.

But wreck and ruin, except as to Huff House, would have been taken as an indication that a very destructive conflict had been staged on the absent owners property.

As soon as the command to get away was given the morning after the battle, household belongings were hurriedly inspected and necessary articles selected to be carried along. The loading was especially difficult on account of lack of help. Charlotte's old man, Jim, had taken his biggest boy and "had run away" several months before, and my oldest brother was not strong enough to handle heavy articles of furniture. And so, when mother's high four-poster got fast in a narrow passway in one of the side doors he and black mammy failed to get it out.

Bidding good-by to home and many much-needed belongings, we were hurried into the city, where we were, for seven eventful weeks, under the siege of Atlanta.

It was on July the 22, the day after we left home because the fighting was so near, that my younger brother John's keen ears caught the sound of distant firing (Battle of Atlanta).

Before that fiery July sun had set, thousands of as brave men as ever joined battle, were numbered among the dead. And I saw thousands more brought into the city in ominous black covered ambulances which made their slow, pain-laden way up Decatur Street to several improvised hospitals where Dr. Noe D'Alvigny and Dr. Logan, as well as many of Atlanta's most prominent ladies, waited to try to ease their suffering.

As the battle, raging to the east and southeast of us, grew more fierce, the line of ambulances creeping up Decatur street increased. The dismal-looking vehicles had their side curtains lifted to let in the air, for the heat was intense.

We could see from our viewpoint, in front of the old-time residence of Charles Shearer Sr., the blood trickling down from the wounds of the poor helpless victims of one of the war's most terrible battles.

Men were clinging to sides of the hospital vans trying to fan away the terrible swarms of flies which hovered over the wounded, My young brother John went into action, as he usually did when he saw a chance to be helpful. Noticing that a fly brush had just fallen from the hands of a man on one of the ambulances, and had been crushed by the heavy wheels, he grabbed the slit-paper fly brush that mother handed him, and leaping to the side of the slow-moving ambulance, became one of the most efficient fly fanners in the procession. He was less than 12 years of age.

On one of the wagons sat a priest comforting a dying soldier. Later on this same man of God aided Dr. D'Alvigny in saving the churches and the Medical College.

The next day, mother, being uneasy about father's brother, Wilson Huff, whom she thought was in the fight, but was already a prisoner, and later died at Camp Chase, Ohio, took John and me and black mammy with her and walked out to the battlefield to hunt Uncle Wilson. But he had been captured at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain and was never heard of until his captain, who had been a captive at Camp Chase, Ohio, returned to his home months after the war was over and told how he had seen Wilson carried to the smallpox hospital and had heard him singing, as the van moved slowly' through Camp Chase, "I'm But a Stranger Here, Heaven Is My Home!" He was one of the seven sons that grandmother had in the war, and one of the three who never returned.

In company with us that day on the battlefield was an elderly couple looking for their son. They were about to come away when we saw a temporary burial going on in a nearby thicket. Their soldier boy was being put under the ground.

When mother and the rest of us walked over the battlefield of July 22 on the day after it was fought over, the ground looked as though it had been plowed up,and it was literally red with blood that had been spilled there the day before.

During the battle the bullets fell thickly in the yard of 'the Atlanta Medical College where Dr. D'Alvigny was operating. His daughter, Pauline D'Alvigny Campbell, who was assisting her father, narrowly escaped being hit several times, since on account of the intense heat the operating table had been carried out into the shade of several nearby trees. Now it was hurriedly carried in. Pauline picked up some of the bullets, and showed them to me fifty years later, shortly before her death. She and my mother were lifetime friends.

My eyes have watched the path of a shell as it stretched like a shining thread across the war clouds hanging over the city of Atlanta in the summer of 1864. Fireworks of later years have in exposition displays reminded me of the dramatic night scenes of my war-time childhood. Rockets seem to curve in their course, while a shell moves on as evenly as did Lindbergh as I watched him sail into Atlanta.

From the open window of my mother's borrowed house on Railroad Street, just west of Decatur Street, I watched the distant fighting and heard the scream' of shells and crash of cannon. The, house was directly behind the home of our benefactor and host, Mr. Charlie Shearer, one of the city's finest old-time English gentlemen. He and his noble wife had invited us to stay there, and we had accepted the invitation after many weeks.

Yes, from the open window I as a child Iay in bed with another member of the family, and watched a scene more spectacular than has been witnessed here by any child since that tragic display of shell fire. The cottage was in line of the firing in the forts on the north and the east of the city. I saw what happened when the guns were turned on the Washington street churches, on the Courthouse, which stood where stands the State Capitol on Peters great flouring mill and on the locomotives plying up and down the tracks through the Georgia Railroad switch yard.

 

My mother, not being in her own home, had no bombproof in her yard to shelter us from the shellstorm. But when the danger became real she and her family followed the neighbors into the rock walled basement of the Richard Peters' flouring mill on the other side of the railroad from our refugee home.

The more furious the firing the bigger the crowd in the basement. There was no such a thing as a stranger, there never was in war-time, and I remember how the men and boys tried to rattle each other about the way they had reacted to a shriekng bombshell. Like an electric storm going over, the shelling seldom lasted more than an hour or so, and the people then went home and put the children to bed.

The experience of having one's house hit by a bomb is not very different from having it struck by lightning. Our house of refuge was partly torn to pieces one night while we were in the mill basement, and Huff House had been struck by lighting.

Conditions grew so unbearable that mother decided to try to get back home, but everything was against that. The enemy was in possession. Turning southwest, she planned to go to some of her Utoy Church friends. She mrade her way to the oId home of Mr. and Mrs. William White. They were gone and the officer who was staying in their house insisted on her coming in out of the rainstorm, but she sat in her buggy the hole night long, her children and Charlotte's little darkey asleep around her. Older brother minded the horse and the mules. John and Charlotte were in charge of the cows. Geting frightened at the picket firing close by, the cows both broke loose and ran away. Mother thought them gone forever, but strange freak of good fortune she recovered one of them. From a distance of not less than seven miles the wise, home loving bovine found her way back to her own green pasture on Woodall Creek.

After returning from ref ugeeing -mother bought butter from an old man she had known for many years. After several weeks she accidentally found out, what the cunning old thief knew from the first: she was buying her own cow's butter. A well-known judge, father of a very prominent Atlanta family, forced that man to give mother's cow back to her and would not let her pay a cent in court cost.

Trying to get out of the shell-infested danger zone, and failing in every effort, mother returned to the Railroad Street cottage, behind the Shearer home. A letter to my father happened to reach him in Virginia. One man in his company was due a furlough. The captain gave it to him. He had a hard time getting into the city. Atlanta was by that time almost surrounded by General Sherman's army. Father had left his horse at grandmother's in Newton County, and had come on foot in order to try to slip through the lines at night. He said he found that a hard thing to do, and only on the second night could he find a slipping place.

When he found out the dire danger his family was in he put forth every effort to get us out and on our way to his relatives, Newton and Walton County citizens. He could trust them to take care of us. His furlough being for only a very few days, he could carry us only as far as Conyers, Ga. Some of his kin carried him to Covington to get his horse, and most kindly took care of us for three weeks, when other refugee relatives arrived, and mother gladly and gratefully accepted the invitation of our dear old great uncle, near Social Circle, Ga.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 5

 

To the southern people of the sixties refugeeing was a catastrophe. The breaking up of homes disrupted the neighborhood and destroyed the community.

I am unable to recall a single instance where a country home, once destroyed, was restored, or a church, burned by the 'invaders, rebuilt for the same congregation or in the same place. Even the "big roads" and the byways took new directions.

Father came through the Federal lines at night in his effort to get us out of the besieged city. He and two other citizens succeeded in getting government wagons to rush their families and belongings to Tanner's Church, ten miles south of Atlanta. He then went right on to his mother's, in Newton County, where he had left his horse to rest while he came walking to Atlanta. After that he hurried to his command in Virginia.

We were bedded in the church building where numbers other refugeeing people were already asleep. The outsiders kept calling into the open windows that balls of fire were falling into the ten-miles-away city of Atlanta. I don't know about that. I was trying to do something unusual for me, that was, go to sleep in church. My habit was to sit up and count every one present, until mother would notice my' whispered record, and I would stop whispering. She used to tell, me that I laughed out in church when I was four months old when a horse, hitched to a limb close to an open window, whinnied.

On the following morning, long before the sunbeams began to smile on us from over Stone Mountain, to the northeast, we were on our way to our temporary stop at the home of father's brother-in-law, Miles Penn, who lived near Smyrna Campground, a few miles west of Conyers, Ga. Miles Pen a native of Pennsylvannia, had married father's oldest sister when she was 14 and he 17 years of age. They had seventeen children.

Knowing that mother was on the way and that help would be needed in fording the unbridged South River, our uncle sent some of his half-grown boys and his faithful old slave to wade the rushing river, and lead the teams across. John, my brother, was in his glory and frolicked in the water up to his neck. Montgomery drove the mules, Charlotte sat beside mother and lifted the children out of reach of the river, while mother stood up and drove Mike.

Just as the fording was about to begin Dr. Ben Penn, one of the five Confederate soldier sons of Uncle and Aunt Penn, came riding along and reaching over, lifted me from where I was standing on the back seat of the buggy to a place in front of him on his big black horse. That is how I crossed the river and got to "Uncle Miles" home first. People usually dress to go somewhere, but we got dressed after we got there in dry clothes.

As there was no separate residence available at the Penn home, mother's force joined in with the other workers in whatever was to be done. The cotton gins and the cane mills called for all the help they could get.

A vivid Penn picture comes back to my mind's eye. The ladies of the family, the largest family I ever knew, seemed continually shelling cowpeas for dinner and supper, and my mother, with her apron full of the staple war-food, sat beside them and shelled. Our Charlotte helped cook. Cowpeas, corrbread, ham, chicken pie and other goodies sent out such an alluring call that I, who had to wait with the other youngsters, thought the grownups tied to the table. Soon we went on. On the Jackson Peters estate, three miles distant from Social Circle, we found a good house awaiting us. "Uncle Jack," like "Uncle Miles," was a Pennsylvanian. He married Grandma Huff's sister; Miles married her daughter. The Army was coming. My brothers were hiding in the river swamp, guarding the stock. During the danger time they'd slip in after midnight, lift the flooring in the backroom, and sleep in the bed mother had made in the potato bank.

For some mysterious reason Uncle Jack's property was not bothered. Neither was mother's. From the doorway of that right-on-the-highway house of refuge, I as a child I looked out upon one of the most wonderful moving pictures of modern times. Sherman was marching through Georgia. Heralded by fife and drum, came cavalry by thousands, infantry by tens of thousands, artillery divisions, wagon trains and army followers of various kinds.

Noisily wending their way over the worst of roads between the Yellow River and unfordable Alcovyhachee, it took three for the panorama to pass. Sometimes black smoke, rising in the forest beyond the cotton fields, indicated that campfires had set the woods on fire. Again it meant some stately mansion, cotton gin or much-needed grist mill had fallen a prey to vandalism.

All through the day and through the night the sound of fire works told that the victor was looking after the spoils. The mighty army must be fed. The claim was that all was fair in war. Love was not expected, and no hatred was expressed, but of humanity there was an outstanding instance. While the army was passing, a distantly-related boy cousin of mine died. His war-widowed mother was most grateful when she learned that General Sherman, on hearing of the youth's death, had ordered his carpenters to make a coffin for him and assist with the burial in Harris Springs Churchyard.

Among the things that call for special attention as I, a child eight years, watched that historic parade from mother's Walton County front door, was a southern lady's piano being stummed by a Federal soldier in a big Army wagon.

In all the splendor of cast-off blue uniforms and brass buttons marched many ex-slaves. Like salvation, they were free. Our aunt, Mrs. John Floyd Huff, also refugeeing with her family from Atlanta, found shelter with our Grandmother Huff, nine miles south of Covington.

"Reports had gone from Atlanta warning Confederate wives and mothers to hide letters, pictures and other belongings Of the wearers of the gray.

My aunt, whose treasures of that kind were hidden between the mattress of our 99-year-old great-grandmother's bed, lifted 'Little Granny" in her arms and put her to bed, telling her to sleep quickly. The soldiers who came to the house were told that the old lady was extremely ill and that if they entered the room it would certainly kill her. "Little Granny" listened with astonishment and extreme disgust, and in the shortest time possible added to the confusion by hopping out of bed and saying: "Why, Effie! What do you mean? I'm not sick. I'm going into the yard to see what is the matter with the chickens. "

The house was ransacked, but the articles were not found. My aunt barely escaped arrest, she rebelled so bitterly at the destruction carried on outside. But she had her inning when the beegums were attacked. The bees swarmed over the soldiers and stung them so dreadfully that the march through Georgia was resumed immediately.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 6-20 To be Continued