Georgia’s lottery is nothing new. Between 1805 and 1833, the state held eight land lotteries. Seventy-five percent of Georgia was sold to roughly 100,000 people for bargain prices. As land-hungry Georgians began migrating westward after the American Revolution, the state negotiated treaties with the Creek and Cherokee tribes—or simply took their land—and then distributed the […]
Peaches, peanuts, poultry: Georgia has a lot of all of them. But Pickens County has the most crystalline marble of any place in the world. One of the most highly prized minerals, it’s in 60 percent of the monuments in Washington D.C. Native Americans used north Georgia marble hundreds of years before it was first […]
They were soul men long before the Blues Brothers. Florida native Samuel Moore and Georgian David Prater were gospel music veterans when they joined together in 1961 to form the rhythm and blues duo Sam and Dave. From 1965 to ’68 the duo worked at Stax Records in Memphis with Songwriters Isaac Hayes and David […]
Mixing religion and politics worked out well for Henry McNeal Turner. Free-born in South Carolina in 1834, he was educated by white attorneys at a firm where he did janitorial work. Drawn to preaching, he led revivals in Macon, Athens, and Augusta. He pastored a church in Washington D.C., where he met Republican congressmen Charles […]
One of the most popular preachers in England and America in the 18th century first arrived in Savannah on this day in 1738. George Whitefield was born in 1714 in England, and educated at Oxford, where he met John and Charles Wesley; together they were the first leaders of the Methodist movement. After the Wesleys […]
Truman Capote made the Clutter family murders in Kansas famous in his book In Cold Blood. Georgia’s counterpart was the Alday family murders, one of the most notorious cases in Georgia history. Carl Isaacs and two other men escaped from a Maryland prison in May 1973 and picked up Carl’s 15-year-old brother Billy. They killed […]
General William Tecumseh Sherman introduced himself to the people of Georgia on this day in 1864. The Confederacy still had a chance to win the Civil War if Robert E. Lee could hold onto the capital at Richmond, and if Joe Johnston could keep Sherman from taking Atlanta, the South’s major railroad hub. President Lincoln […]
“Pop music is sex and you have to hit them in the face with it.” So said the Rolling Stones’ manager as they rolled onto the music scene in 1962. They were the vanguard of the British Invasion, a new breed of pop stars influenced by Elvis and Chuck Berry. The Stones made the Beatles […]
He was a Georgia native responsible for turning Robert E. Lee’s plantation into a national cemetery. Montgomery Meigs was born in Augusta in 1816 and graduated from the U.S. Military academy at West Point. Meigs was assigned to the Army Corps of Engineers and oversaw the construction of many of Washington’s most important buildings, including […]
In Savannah it’s “the book.” John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was published in January 1994. The non-fiction account of antiques dealer Jim Williams’ trial for murdering Danny Hansford became a major bestseller. Waves of welcome tourists flooded Savannah, searching for the places and characters Berendt made famous: the Mercer House […]
