She was the first female architect in Georgia and the first woman in the South to receive formal architectural training. Henrietta Dozier was born in Fernandina, Florida, in 1872, and moved to Atlanta when she was 2 years old. Dozier studied Beaux-Arts classicism at the Pratt Institute in New York. At 27, she earned her […]
He was the architect of one of the most remarkable logistical feats in history — and one of the most humane. Lucius Clay was born in Marietta in 1897, the son of U.S. Senator Alexander Stephens Clay. He graduated from West Point in 1918 and was assigned to the engineers. During World War II, Clay […]
To be African-American and born during slavery didn’t necessarily mean you were a slave. Lucy Craft Laney was born in 1854, but her father had purchased freedom for him and his wife. For Laney, freedom meant education. Able to read and write by age four and translate Latin by 12, she joined the first class […]
A U.S. Army fort in Columbus is named for a man who waged war against the U.S. Army. Henry Benning, born in Columbia County, was one of Georgia’s most outspoken disunionists. During the sectional crisis of the 1850s, Benning defended slavery. He ran for Congress on a Southern rights platform and lost. But he found […]
He was one of the first Georgians to attempt to create a truly color-blind society after the Civil War. Tunis Campbell was born in New Jersey in 1812 to free black parents. Educated at an all-white academy in New York, he joined the abolitionist movement. By the early 1860s Campbell was a married father and […]
Margaret Mitchell portrayed him as a corrupt carpetbagger, whose great failing was to be a Republican who supported African-American equality. Rufus Bullock was born in 1834 in New York. He moved to Augusta and did business with the Confederates after the Civil War began, though he opposed secession. He was a lieutenant colonel in the […]
Fannin County in north Georgia is named for Georgian James Fannin, who fought in the Texas independence movement. Having attended West Point, Fannin was commissioned a colonel in the Texas Regular Army and raised the Georgia Battalion, primarily volunteers from Macon and Columbus. In 1836 at the Spanish fort at Goliad, on the banks of […]
The General was the famous train captured by Andrews’ Raiders during the Civil War, and later made famous by Buster Keaton’s 1927 film, and the 1956 movie The Great Locomotive Chase. On this day in 1939, Gov. E.D. Rivers signed a joint resolution calling on the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee to give it back. The […]
This Connecticut carpetbagger turned out to be mighty welcome. Henry Tift was born in 1841 in Mystic, Connecticut. After the Civil War, he came to Albany, Georgia to manage his uncle’s manufacturing firm. He liked what he saw, and stayed for the next 50 years. Tift started a lumber business in nearby Berrien County and […]
A man born a slave in Georgia was the first African-American to graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Henry Ossian Flipper was born in Thomasville in 1856. After the Civil War, Henry graduated from West Point in 1877 and joined the famed Buffalo Soldiers, the 10th Cavalry Regiment. At Fort Davis in […]
