In a half century of teaching, Moses Waddel taught some of the most influential and important statesmen of the 19th century. Born in North Carolina in 1770, he began teaching at age 14. He moved to Georgia briefly but left to attend Hampden Sydney College in Virginia and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister. After […]
He was one of those classic character actors from the golden age of Hollywood but you probably didn’t know his name. Actor Charles Coburn was born in Macon in 1877 and grew up in Savannah. At age 19, after working in local theater, he headed off to Broadway. When his first wife died in 1937, […]
As was said of the great architect Christopher Wren, if you wish to know his legacy, look around you. George Heery was born in Athens in 1927. After a stint in the Pacific theater in the Navy during World War II, he earned an architectural degree at Georgia Tech. George and his father founded the […]
She was the first African-American woman elected to the Georgia Legislature. Grace Towns Hamilton was born in Atlanta in 1907. She graduated from Atlanta University in 1927 before earning a masters degree in psychology from Ohio State. Hamilton taught college for the next decade before she was appointed executive director of the Atlanta Urban League […]
If you love roller coasters, you probably should thank Six Flags. Opened in 1967, the park takes its name from the six flags that have flown over some part of Georgia during its long history—Spain, France, Great Britain, the United States, the Confederacy, and the state of Georgia. Angus Wynne had opened Six Flags over […]
Missouri has Mark Twain. Georgia has Bill Arp, the pen name for Charles Henry Smith. Born in Lawrenceville in 1826, Smith moved to Rome in 1851 to practice law. After the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, Smith wrote a letter under the pen name “Bill Arp” to President Lincoln in the humorous dialect favored by […]
Farmer, railroad worker, horse jockey, moonshiner and country music’s first big star — that was John William Carson. Fannin County native fiddlin’ John Carson was a colorful character who played every year at the Georgia old-time fiddlers’ conventions in Atlanta beginning in 1913. He first gained fame performing “The Ballad Of Mary Phagan” during the […]
The man who assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a small-time crook with big ambitions. James Earl Ray was born in Alton, Illinois, in 1928. After spending some time in the Army, he robbed gas stations and grocery stores. First convicted in 1949, Ray was serving a 20-year prison sentence in Missouri when he […]
It grew from a crop-dusting company based in the Mississippi River delta and became one of Georgia’s most famous corporate residents. Delta Air Lines began life in 1924 as a crop duster, based first in Macon and then Monroe, Louisiana. Collett Woolman bought the company in 1928 and renamed it Delta Air Service, with passenger […]
The burning of Darien, Georgia, depicted in the Civil War movie, Glory, was one of the most controversial acts of the War. Situated on the Atlantic coast, Darien thrived during the antebellum period as the shipping point for cotton, rice, and lumber. In June 1863, most of Darien’s 500 residents had already fled inland when […]
