20th Century

Before Vince Dooley became synonymous with Georgia football, there was Wally Butts. Known as the “Little Round Man,” Butts was born in Milledgeville and earned scholarships in three sports at Mercer University. Butts became the University of Georgia’s head football coach in 1939. Over 22 seasons he led the Bulldogs to 140 wins, four SEC […]

He began life as a slave but, at 47, Alonzo Herndon started the company that became one of America’s most successful black-owned businesses. Alonzo Franklin Herndon was born in Social Circle, the son of a black mother and a white owner. With just a year of formal education, he opened a barbershop in Jonesboro in […]

His novels captured the desperation of poverty in Georgia and seared that image into the American psyche. Erskine Caldwell was born in Coweta County in 1903, the son of a home missionary. Caldwell witnessed firsthand the grinding poverty of poor blacks and whites. He wanted his writing to bring their plight to the wider world. […]

The first Georgian to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction was a woman who never went to college. Caroline Miller was born in Waycross and published her first novel, Lamb in His Bosom in 1933. It won the Pulitzer the next year. While Miller worked every day as a housewife and raised three children, she […]

In Gainesville, chickens rule the roost, thanks to a native son who made Gainesville the poultry capital of the world. Jesse Jewell was born in 1902. His father owned a feed and seed store. After studying civil engineering, Jewell went to work in the family business. During the Great Depression, Jewell got into the poultry […]

It was easy to get Charles McCartney’s goat. Born in Iowa in 1901, McCartney got hurt working for the New Deal WPA in 1935. A religious awakening led him to hitch a team of goats to a wagon and travel the country with his wife and son, dressed in goatskins, preaching the Gospel. Thus was […]

She just wanted to be known as Mrs. John Marsh. Margaret Mitchell was her maiden name. Born in Atlanta in 1900, she lived away from the city only once, for a year, at Smith College. Her grandfather fought in the Civil War; her mother’s family was Irish Catholic, like the O’Hara’s of Tara. Mitchell went […]

She lived by two rules: love what you do and eat right. It clearly worked for Leila Denmark. At the age of 103, she was the oldest practicing pediatrician in the country when she retired in 2001. Born in Bulloch County in 1898, Denmark made a bold choice for a woman at that time – […]

He was one of the most powerful Americans of the 20th century and served in public office for more than half of it. Richard Brevard Russell, Jr., born in Winder in 1897, graduated from the University of Georgia’s Law School. He immediately entered politics, winning election to the state legislature at 23. At 33, he […]

An ambulance driver, a lawyer and the first woman elected to Congress from Georgia* — all stops along the way for Helen Douglas Mankin. Mankin was the daughter of two lawyers. She drove an ambulance in France during World War I, and then graduated from Atlanta Law School, which her father helped found. She and […]