The immediate years after World War II were a time for Voil and Annie's children to get married and get back to normal life. The Webbs had four weddings in fairly close order: Robert Webb with Anna Louise Koontz on March 24, 1945; Leonard Webb with Dolores Grace Kidwell on Aug. 26, 1945; Richard Webb with Teresa Lusby on (DATE?); and Wah Ni Tahe Webb with William Albert Baker. More than a dozen children soon followed. There's a family story that it was during Robert and Anna's wedding that Leonard and Dolores announced they were engaged and Richard met Teresa. (Teresa supposedly was brought to the wedding by Dan Webb, who never married.)
Voil continued to live rather quietly. Aside from doing masonry jobs, he produced bricklayers' levels as a hobby. He died in January 1961 and is buried at National Memorial Park in Falls Church, Va., above his name are a pair of builder's squares used in bricklaying and construction.
Annie moved back into the city, living mainly in the Belvedere Apartments at 1301 Massachusetts Ave. NW. Today that's a fairly gentrified area, but when Annie lived there it was tumble-down and scarred from the 1968 riots when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. She lived there until her death in December 1976. She is buried next to Voil at National Memorial Park.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Reconstruction (DC, 1929-1945)
Heading North
At the start of 1929, Grady Voil Webb was 41 and entering what ought to have been what financial analysts would call his prime earning years. He was a successful contractor in a bustling city, as well as an official with the local Bricklayers Union (where his brother-in-law was president). He had built his own home and business, had four children and, by all accounts, owned a pretty nice car. His wife, Annie, had reason to feel proud.
Then came the stock market crash and the Great Depression. Within a year, the life of Voil, Annie, and their children changed dramatically.
The first big shift occurred when Voil decided to seek work in Washington. There was so little construction going on in Atlanta that it made sense to go to a city that, because of the federal government, wasn't ever going to go out of business.
According to Voil's son Robert Webb, Voil came up to D.C. when he heard that a headquarters for the Commerce Department was being built. His brother-in-law and sometime business partner G. Leonard Tarrant was from Washington, and Voil knew an executive on the project named Dick Martin, whom he had befriended at an earlier time when Martin needed a job. This time the shoe was on the other foot, and Martin put Voil to work, probably as a bricklayer.
Robert continued: "In 1930, Grandma Webb (Voil's wife Annie) brought up all the kids in a red Buick sedan. He didn't expect them. They stayed until [Robert's sister, Margarette Wah Ni Tahe Webb] was born." That was on Sept. 28, 1930.
How Wah Ni Tahe (or just 'Nita, as she was known in the family) got her name isn't exactly clear. One joke was that her brother Richard named her after having driven up 14th Street in Washington--at that time an entertainment hotspot--and saw a marquee for an exotic dancer with that name. Wa Ni Tahe also might have represented a bow to Annie Stephens' (as-yet unproven) Indian heritage. Family records haven't turned up any other Webbs or Stephens with the names Margarette or Wah Ni Tahe.
After the birth, it appears that Annie and the kids then returned to Georgia. There, according to Robert, his mother had given away so many family possessions that the family decided to move into the home of "Aunt Meg." That's probably Maggie Stephens, the second-oldest sibling of Annie's family. By this time, Maggie had married a tailor named Robert Stuart (sp?) and lived about two blocks from the state Capitol. Those children who were of school age began attending classes in Georgia that fall of 1930. Maggie helped keep them clothed by taking scraps from her husband's shop and creating clothes. At Robert's funeral, a story was told about how a teacher tossed young Robert out of elementary school one day because he showed up in knickers made of some fancy material when other children were struggling to afford denim. Likewise, Robert's brother Leonard recalled wearing playclothes made of sateen.
Meanwhile, Voil had a cousin who helped him find work in New York. When that project ended, Voil returned to Washington and drove a taxicab.
Annie and the children spent the summer of 1931 in commerce at the home of Martha Lucinda Wills Webb. ("Grandma was a sweet old lady," Robert recalled.) The family stayed in Commerce that fall and didn't return to Atlanta until it was early winter, Robert says. Then, around April 1932, the children and Annie moved to D.C. for good.
Thin Mortar
Voil never achieved the business success in Washington that he enjoyed in Atlanta before the Crash. One could dare say that he spent the rest of his life a broken man. The family lived in a series of rented hoses during the 1930s and early 1940s, most of them in a working-class area of northeast Washington close to the H Street business corridor. Voil's children have told stories about how their father rarely got fulltime work, and that the family stayed afloat in part because eldest son Richard by then was old enough to contribute economically. There also are stories that Annie never forgave her husband for slipping into poverty, and so she strove to show there wasn't a Depression at her household. "Granny would give away the food on the table to make it appear as if she were a big deal," Robert said. She also was said to have regularly rifled money from Richard's pants pockets while he was asleep.
This existance continued for at least a decade. One popular tale recounts how Robert was getting ready to graduate from Eastern High School but lacked the suit that graduating boys would wear in that era. Eventually he got his diploma wearing a suit borrowed from the family bookie.
(Note: When I first heard this story, I asked my father Leonard: "How could we have had a family bookie? We were Baptists! Leonard replied that the games were extremely minor, such as betting a few pennies on the last three digits that the Washington Post would declare in the next day's paper as its latest circulation. I have since learned that in those days before credit cards and overdraft allowances, bookies were a common source of small, short-term loans. Thus, a bookie was no doubt a good person to know.)
The family rarely went back to Georgia. Dr. Charles Owen, a nephew of Voil and son of Blondine Webb, says Voil came to visit Blondine just one time that Charles could recall. When he did, he repaid the hospitality by bricking up a back wall of Blondine's house.
"He was a small fellow and had a Webb look--a double chin," Owen said. "I've never seen a dumb Webb. They're all smart."
Washington Goes to War
Washington snapped to attention following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941. The war effort ended the Depression, and most of the Webb children found work--particularly Richard, who remained a mainstay of the family despite having lost his sight in one eye. Annie also took up work during the war years, running a cash register at the Hamilton Hotel at 16th and K Streets NW in Washington. Son Dan worked there as a bellman, as did a young woman named Teresa Lusby.
Voil found himself at the age of 53 competing with much younger men for rough, heavily manual labor jobs. He continued to work sporadically from job to job.
The Webbs' war service varied markedly. Richard stayed stateside. Robert served in the U.S. Army Air Force as a B-17 bomber pilot stationed in North Africa and Italy. He flew 51 combat missions. There are stories that the "Flying Fortress" he piloted was the only one in a particular mission to return to base, while on another mission he was the only person in the B-17 to come back alive. For his service, he was awarded three Distinguished Flying Crosses and a Medal of Valor.
Dan enlisted but was discharged just over a month later. That short stay proved crucial to him in later years, for it qualified him for extensive medical care at a Veterans Administration hospital near the end of his life as well as for burial in a military cemetery. Leonard left high school prior to graduation, entered the Coast Guard Academy, but washed out. He joined the merchant marines. While officially a civilian, his jobs mainly involved carrying goods for the war effort to faraway places; it was the kind of service that led to many, many casualties, particularly when German U-boats attacked ships in the north Atlanta. Leonard sailed as far as India. He was well past retirement before the government recognized this service and the federal government began making merchant marines eligible for veterans' benefits.
At the start of 1929, Grady Voil Webb was 41 and entering what ought to have been what financial analysts would call his prime earning years. He was a successful contractor in a bustling city, as well as an official with the local Bricklayers Union (where his brother-in-law was president). He had built his own home and business, had four children and, by all accounts, owned a pretty nice car. His wife, Annie, had reason to feel proud.
Then came the stock market crash and the Great Depression. Within a year, the life of Voil, Annie, and their children changed dramatically.
The first big shift occurred when Voil decided to seek work in Washington. There was so little construction going on in Atlanta that it made sense to go to a city that, because of the federal government, wasn't ever going to go out of business.
According to Voil's son Robert Webb, Voil came up to D.C. when he heard that a headquarters for the Commerce Department was being built. His brother-in-law and sometime business partner G. Leonard Tarrant was from Washington, and Voil knew an executive on the project named Dick Martin, whom he had befriended at an earlier time when Martin needed a job. This time the shoe was on the other foot, and Martin put Voil to work, probably as a bricklayer.
Robert continued: "In 1930, Grandma Webb (Voil's wife Annie) brought up all the kids in a red Buick sedan. He didn't expect them. They stayed until [Robert's sister, Margarette Wah Ni Tahe Webb] was born." That was on Sept. 28, 1930.
How Wah Ni Tahe (or just 'Nita, as she was known in the family) got her name isn't exactly clear. One joke was that her brother Richard named her after having driven up 14th Street in Washington--at that time an entertainment hotspot--and saw a marquee for an exotic dancer with that name. Wa Ni Tahe also might have represented a bow to Annie Stephens' (as-yet unproven) Indian heritage. Family records haven't turned up any other Webbs or Stephens with the names Margarette or Wah Ni Tahe.
After the birth, it appears that Annie and the kids then returned to Georgia. There, according to Robert, his mother had given away so many family possessions that the family decided to move into the home of "Aunt Meg." That's probably Maggie Stephens, the second-oldest sibling of Annie's family. By this time, Maggie had married a tailor named Robert Stuart (sp?) and lived about two blocks from the state Capitol. Those children who were of school age began attending classes in Georgia that fall of 1930. Maggie helped keep them clothed by taking scraps from her husband's shop and creating clothes. At Robert's funeral, a story was told about how a teacher tossed young Robert out of elementary school one day because he showed up in knickers made of some fancy material when other children were struggling to afford denim. Likewise, Robert's brother Leonard recalled wearing playclothes made of sateen.
Meanwhile, Voil had a cousin who helped him find work in New York. When that project ended, Voil returned to Washington and drove a taxicab.
Annie and the children spent the summer of 1931 in commerce at the home of Martha Lucinda Wills Webb. ("Grandma was a sweet old lady," Robert recalled.) The family stayed in Commerce that fall and didn't return to Atlanta until it was early winter, Robert says. Then, around April 1932, the children and Annie moved to D.C. for good.
Thin Mortar
Voil never achieved the business success in Washington that he enjoyed in Atlanta before the Crash. One could dare say that he spent the rest of his life a broken man. The family lived in a series of rented hoses during the 1930s and early 1940s, most of them in a working-class area of northeast Washington close to the H Street business corridor. Voil's children have told stories about how their father rarely got fulltime work, and that the family stayed afloat in part because eldest son Richard by then was old enough to contribute economically. There also are stories that Annie never forgave her husband for slipping into poverty, and so she strove to show there wasn't a Depression at her household. "Granny would give away the food on the table to make it appear as if she were a big deal," Robert said. She also was said to have regularly rifled money from Richard's pants pockets while he was asleep.
This existance continued for at least a decade. One popular tale recounts how Robert was getting ready to graduate from Eastern High School but lacked the suit that graduating boys would wear in that era. Eventually he got his diploma wearing a suit borrowed from the family bookie.
(Note: When I first heard this story, I asked my father Leonard: "How could we have had a family bookie? We were Baptists! Leonard replied that the games were extremely minor, such as betting a few pennies on the last three digits that the Washington Post would declare in the next day's paper as its latest circulation. I have since learned that in those days before credit cards and overdraft allowances, bookies were a common source of small, short-term loans. Thus, a bookie was no doubt a good person to know.)
The family rarely went back to Georgia. Dr. Charles Owen, a nephew of Voil and son of Blondine Webb, says Voil came to visit Blondine just one time that Charles could recall. When he did, he repaid the hospitality by bricking up a back wall of Blondine's house.
"He was a small fellow and had a Webb look--a double chin," Owen said. "I've never seen a dumb Webb. They're all smart."
Washington Goes to War
Washington snapped to attention following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941. The war effort ended the Depression, and most of the Webb children found work--particularly Richard, who remained a mainstay of the family despite having lost his sight in one eye. Annie also took up work during the war years, running a cash register at the Hamilton Hotel at 16th and K Streets NW in Washington. Son Dan worked there as a bellman, as did a young woman named Teresa Lusby.
Voil found himself at the age of 53 competing with much younger men for rough, heavily manual labor jobs. He continued to work sporadically from job to job.
The Webbs' war service varied markedly. Richard stayed stateside. Robert served in the U.S. Army Air Force as a B-17 bomber pilot stationed in North Africa and Italy. He flew 51 combat missions. There are stories that the "Flying Fortress" he piloted was the only one in a particular mission to return to base, while on another mission he was the only person in the B-17 to come back alive. For his service, he was awarded three Distinguished Flying Crosses and a Medal of Valor.
Dan enlisted but was discharged just over a month later. That short stay proved crucial to him in later years, for it qualified him for extensive medical care at a Veterans Administration hospital near the end of his life as well as for burial in a military cemetery. Leonard left high school prior to graduation, entered the Coast Guard Academy, but washed out. He joined the merchant marines. While officially a civilian, his jobs mainly involved carrying goods for the war effort to faraway places; it was the kind of service that led to many, many casualties, particularly when German U-boats attacked ships in the north Atlanta. Leonard sailed as far as India. He was well past retirement before the government recognized this service and the federal government began making merchant marines eligible for veterans' benefits.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Acts of Commerce (Georgia and more, 1910-1960)
The years between 1910 and 1920 also saw Voil's brother Gilder leave the nest. According to the census, he began the decade running a "pressing club"--what we would call a laundry and cleaners. Robert Webb said he had heard years ago that Gilder from time to time would borrow clothes from the pressing club when he needed something nice to wear. Robert said he didn't think much of the story until one time decades later, while down in Jackson County, he happened to run into some elderly ladies who remembered the young Gilder. "Oh, he was such a fancy dresser!" one of them said.
Gilder's son, Martin Gilder Webb Jr., said his father remained in school until about the eighth grade. He said his father had always wanted to join the Navy and tried to enter before he was old enough to enlist. He finally got in in 1915, just before the United States entered World War I.
An undated newspaper clipping, probably from the Commerce newspaper in 1919, reports: "The Observer received a letter this week from Gilder Webb, who is 'Somewhere at Sea' on the battleship Kansas. The letter contained a money order for $3.00 for the extension of his subscription to The Observer. Owing to the strict censorship pass on all correspondence of soldiers and sailors, Gilder could not express himself freely in regard to his activities and experiences. However, he states that Uncle Sam had an efficient fleet and that the Kaiser would have a lively time trying to show anything to Uncle Sam's sea-fighting craft. Gilder is a son of Mrs. M.L. Webb of this city. He joined the Navy about three years ago since which time he has seen a good portion of the world and encountered many thrilling experiences. In his letter he asked us to extend his regards to all the people of Commerce. His address is 6th Division Engineers, USS Kansas, care of Postmaster, New York."
Reality might not have been quite so glamorous, as it appears one of his main jobs was shoveling coal to power the ship's steam engines. According to an e-mail from Martin Gilder Webb Jr., "Dad was a coal passer on the USS Wisconsin on July 15-16, 1915, when it and the two other ships of the Naval Academy Practice Squadron--the USS Missouri and USS Ohio--were the first battleships to pass through the Panama Canal. The squadron was on its way to San Francisco, which I believe was the site of a world's fair." (He's right on that count: It was called the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.)
Gilder's travels also took him to Philadelphia, where in the suburb of Germantown, 25-year-old Edith Quay decided to keep up military spirits by writing to a serviceman. She did, thinking that her new penpal was somewhere in Europe. Instead, she got a phone call the next day from Gilder. Son Gilder Jr. says Edith didn't think much of him at first, but eventually was won over by the quality of his writing. On Christmas Day 1918, after being together fewer times than you could count on one hand, Gilder Webb and Edith Quay were married.
Gilder remained in the Navy until 1923, when he was discharged as a Machinist Mate First Class. He remained in the Philadelphia area the rest of his life. Aside from Gilder Jr. (born in 1924), he and Edith also had a daughter born a few years later named Helen Edith ("Edie"). The elder Gilder is remembered in part for his high spirits, and Voil's stern visage appeared to melt on those rare occasions when they got together.
Blondine and Gertrell remained in Commerce after Voil and Gilder left. Blondine attended a "Normal School" (as teachers' colleges often were called then) and by 1920 was teaching at a public school. Gertrell took the same route and by 1920 also was a public school teacher. Blondine eventually married Marvin Pierce Owen and settled in Barnesville, Ga., where she taught manual arts and drawing while raising two children, Marvin Pierce Owen Jr. and Charles Edison Owen. Marvin Jr. died in the Korean War in February 1951. He was a University of Georgia graduate, as Charles was. The latter also went to the University of Tennessee, where he became a dentist and built a career in Georgia. Blondine died in 1966 of arteriosclerosis.
Gertrell remained with her mother until Martha Wills Webb's death in 1933. Then, according to nephew Charles Owen, Gertrell worked for a physician and after that took up with Joseph Crews, an insurance agent from Tampa, Fla. Eventually they sold the store and moved to Florida, only to move back north years later and settle in Rome, Ga. That's where Gertrell died in March 1979.
(A personal note: It was during a visit to Georgia with my parents in 1970 that I met Gertrell for the first and only time. She told me about the family history she was working on, and because I was interested in radio at the time, I tape-recorded her as she read from her notes. Those notes are the foundation of this family history.)
The least-known of Voil's siblings is Alton Americus Webb. He lived in the Atlanta area, married a woman named Mattie Mae (Pat) Elrod Matthews, and died of a heart attack in 1958. According to a February 1961 letter from Blondine to sister-in-law Annie Webb, Alton died "when a whole artery bursted open from his heart down through his leg."
Gilder's son, Martin Gilder Webb Jr., said his father remained in school until about the eighth grade. He said his father had always wanted to join the Navy and tried to enter before he was old enough to enlist. He finally got in in 1915, just before the United States entered World War I.
An undated newspaper clipping, probably from the Commerce newspaper in 1919, reports: "The Observer received a letter this week from Gilder Webb, who is 'Somewhere at Sea' on the battleship Kansas. The letter contained a money order for $3.00 for the extension of his subscription to The Observer. Owing to the strict censorship pass on all correspondence of soldiers and sailors, Gilder could not express himself freely in regard to his activities and experiences. However, he states that Uncle Sam had an efficient fleet and that the Kaiser would have a lively time trying to show anything to Uncle Sam's sea-fighting craft. Gilder is a son of Mrs. M.L. Webb of this city. He joined the Navy about three years ago since which time he has seen a good portion of the world and encountered many thrilling experiences. In his letter he asked us to extend his regards to all the people of Commerce. His address is 6th Division Engineers, USS Kansas, care of Postmaster, New York."
Reality might not have been quite so glamorous, as it appears one of his main jobs was shoveling coal to power the ship's steam engines. According to an e-mail from Martin Gilder Webb Jr., "Dad was a coal passer on the USS Wisconsin on July 15-16, 1915, when it and the two other ships of the Naval Academy Practice Squadron--the USS Missouri and USS Ohio--were the first battleships to pass through the Panama Canal. The squadron was on its way to San Francisco, which I believe was the site of a world's fair." (He's right on that count: It was called the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.)
Gilder's travels also took him to Philadelphia, where in the suburb of Germantown, 25-year-old Edith Quay decided to keep up military spirits by writing to a serviceman. She did, thinking that her new penpal was somewhere in Europe. Instead, she got a phone call the next day from Gilder. Son Gilder Jr. says Edith didn't think much of him at first, but eventually was won over by the quality of his writing. On Christmas Day 1918, after being together fewer times than you could count on one hand, Gilder Webb and Edith Quay were married.
Gilder remained in the Navy until 1923, when he was discharged as a Machinist Mate First Class. He remained in the Philadelphia area the rest of his life. Aside from Gilder Jr. (born in 1924), he and Edith also had a daughter born a few years later named Helen Edith ("Edie"). The elder Gilder is remembered in part for his high spirits, and Voil's stern visage appeared to melt on those rare occasions when they got together.
Blondine and Gertrell remained in Commerce after Voil and Gilder left. Blondine attended a "Normal School" (as teachers' colleges often were called then) and by 1920 was teaching at a public school. Gertrell took the same route and by 1920 also was a public school teacher. Blondine eventually married Marvin Pierce Owen and settled in Barnesville, Ga., where she taught manual arts and drawing while raising two children, Marvin Pierce Owen Jr. and Charles Edison Owen. Marvin Jr. died in the Korean War in February 1951. He was a University of Georgia graduate, as Charles was. The latter also went to the University of Tennessee, where he became a dentist and built a career in Georgia. Blondine died in 1966 of arteriosclerosis.
Gertrell remained with her mother until Martha Wills Webb's death in 1933. Then, according to nephew Charles Owen, Gertrell worked for a physician and after that took up with Joseph Crews, an insurance agent from Tampa, Fla. Eventually they sold the store and moved to Florida, only to move back north years later and settle in Rome, Ga. That's where Gertrell died in March 1979.
(A personal note: It was during a visit to Georgia with my parents in 1970 that I met Gertrell for the first and only time. She told me about the family history she was working on, and because I was interested in radio at the time, I tape-recorded her as she read from her notes. Those notes are the foundation of this family history.)
The least-known of Voil's siblings is Alton Americus Webb. He lived in the Atlanta area, married a woman named Mattie Mae (Pat) Elrod Matthews, and died of a heart attack in 1958. According to a February 1961 letter from Blondine to sister-in-law Annie Webb, Alton died "when a whole artery bursted open from his heart down through his leg."
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Brother Webb, Mrs. Webb (Atlanta, 1910-1930)
G. Leonard Tarrant already was playing a big role in Annie Richard Stephens' life by providing a roof over her head when it's likely he did something equally significant: introduce her to Voil Webb. Tarrrant was a brickmason like Voil, so it wouldn't be surprising if they met on a project somewhere in the city. The prospect of a Sunday dinner at the house of a friend and his four young sisters-in-law no doubt would be quite an inducement to a bachelor like Voil.
In any case, Voil Webb and Annie Stephens were married on June 10, 1913.
Their first child, Voil Richard Webb, arrived on April 13, 1914. According to the second son, Robert Stephens Webb (born July 21, 1920), this young family spent much of World War I in Charleston, S.C., where Army barracks were being constructed. (There also are stories that Voil worked for a time in Florida in the 1910s.) But after the war, they returned to Atlanta, and Voil began to make himself known.
The 1920 census found the Webbs living at 481 Capitol St. in Atlanta (roughly near, or perhaps even at, where the Atlanta Braves play baseball today), with Voil listing his profession as "contractor builder." On either side lived families from Greece, Russia, Tennessee and Scotland, as well as people who spoke Greek, Yiddish, German and French. After the insular, relatively monocultural life of Harmony Grove and Toccoa, their new neighborhood must have seemed exotic.
Atlanta city directories from 1921 through 1928 list Voil as a bricklayer or a contractor. His address through 1926 was alternately 157 Love St. or 10 Lanes Lane in the Kirkwood section of Atlanta. According to Robert Webb, Voil wasn't jumping from home to home--rather, it was the same place, but was located on a corner and thus ended up with two different addresses. Voil built the home. During this time came Daniel Audrey Webb, born Sept. 23, 1922, and Leonard Loftis Webb, born July 5, 1926. Leonard's first name was in homage to G. Leonard Tarrant. His middle name, Loftis, is believed to pay respects to a plumber whom Voil befriended in Charleston. Because Leonard Tarrant was very much part of the family when Leonard Loftis Webb was born, he was known to his immediate family as Loftis.
In 1927, the Webbs moved to 215 Norwood Ave. NE in Atlanta. By this time, Voil was a full-fledged businessman, head of the G. Voil Webb Co., mason contractors. Its slogan: "If it's built with brick we can do it." Among other projects, he is believed to have at least contributed to the construction of several schools in the city.
Today, a contractor boss would be regarded as no friend of organized labor, but Voil was an active member of the Bricklayers and Masons International, Local 14. (G. Leonard Tarrant served for a time as the local's president.) A notebook that Voil once owned contains drafts from as early of 1921 of memorial notices typed up for union members and their families who had died. There also are clippings of a column by G. Voil Webb called "Bricklayers Corner" that appear to be taken from an Atlanta labor newspaper.
According to many who knew him, Voil took words seriously. "He had a dog-eared pocket dictionary," son Robert Webb said in 1999. "He'd be reading the newspaper, see a word he wasn't familiar with, pull the dictionary out of his pocket and learn that word." As if to help inspire him in his labor work, the notebook has several articles clipped and saved with titles like "Praise for the Modern Brick" and "Brick is the Aristocrat of All Materials." We don't know if he wrote those.
This collection also contains an article entitled "A Day With a Business Agent" that describes a typical Saturday with Webb as he called upon contracting firms, typing out business letters ("His union does not furnish him with a fluffy-haired stenographer, or any other kind," the article notes) and meeting with bricklayers to give them new assignments.
"Business Agent G.V. Webb, is the Bricklayers' Union, is doing great work," another clipping begins. "Brother Webb has the full cooperation of his local, and that is 99% of the game."
In any case, Voil Webb and Annie Stephens were married on June 10, 1913.
Their first child, Voil Richard Webb, arrived on April 13, 1914. According to the second son, Robert Stephens Webb (born July 21, 1920), this young family spent much of World War I in Charleston, S.C., where Army barracks were being constructed. (There also are stories that Voil worked for a time in Florida in the 1910s.) But after the war, they returned to Atlanta, and Voil began to make himself known.
The 1920 census found the Webbs living at 481 Capitol St. in Atlanta (roughly near, or perhaps even at, where the Atlanta Braves play baseball today), with Voil listing his profession as "contractor builder." On either side lived families from Greece, Russia, Tennessee and Scotland, as well as people who spoke Greek, Yiddish, German and French. After the insular, relatively monocultural life of Harmony Grove and Toccoa, their new neighborhood must have seemed exotic.
Atlanta city directories from 1921 through 1928 list Voil as a bricklayer or a contractor. His address through 1926 was alternately 157 Love St. or 10 Lanes Lane in the Kirkwood section of Atlanta. According to Robert Webb, Voil wasn't jumping from home to home--rather, it was the same place, but was located on a corner and thus ended up with two different addresses. Voil built the home. During this time came Daniel Audrey Webb, born Sept. 23, 1922, and Leonard Loftis Webb, born July 5, 1926. Leonard's first name was in homage to G. Leonard Tarrant. His middle name, Loftis, is believed to pay respects to a plumber whom Voil befriended in Charleston. Because Leonard Tarrant was very much part of the family when Leonard Loftis Webb was born, he was known to his immediate family as Loftis.
In 1927, the Webbs moved to 215 Norwood Ave. NE in Atlanta. By this time, Voil was a full-fledged businessman, head of the G. Voil Webb Co., mason contractors. Its slogan: "If it's built with brick we can do it." Among other projects, he is believed to have at least contributed to the construction of several schools in the city.
Today, a contractor boss would be regarded as no friend of organized labor, but Voil was an active member of the Bricklayers and Masons International, Local 14. (G. Leonard Tarrant served for a time as the local's president.) A notebook that Voil once owned contains drafts from as early of 1921 of memorial notices typed up for union members and their families who had died. There also are clippings of a column by G. Voil Webb called "Bricklayers Corner" that appear to be taken from an Atlanta labor newspaper.
According to many who knew him, Voil took words seriously. "He had a dog-eared pocket dictionary," son Robert Webb said in 1999. "He'd be reading the newspaper, see a word he wasn't familiar with, pull the dictionary out of his pocket and learn that word." As if to help inspire him in his labor work, the notebook has several articles clipped and saved with titles like "Praise for the Modern Brick" and "Brick is the Aristocrat of All Materials." We don't know if he wrote those.
This collection also contains an article entitled "A Day With a Business Agent" that describes a typical Saturday with Webb as he called upon contracting firms, typing out business letters ("His union does not furnish him with a fluffy-haired stenographer, or any other kind," the article notes) and meeting with bricklayers to give them new assignments.
"Business Agent G.V. Webb, is the Bricklayers' Union, is doing great work," another clipping begins. "Brother Webb has the full cooperation of his local, and that is 99% of the game."
To the Metropolis (Georgia, 1890-1910)
Small-Town Boy Makes Good
Grady Voil Webb and his siblings represent several significant shifts in Webb family history. The five children who lived to adulthood--Voil, Gertrelle, Blondine, Gilder and Alton--all were born in a small town, but Voil and Gilder moved to big cities (Atlanta and Philadelphia), while Blondine and Gertrelle were he first to go to college. And from a family that had been signing its papers with an "X" came not only the initial signs of education, but also of artistic creativity.
Voil and twin sister Vella were the first children of Americus Stephens and Martha Lucinda Wills Webb, arriving in February 1888 in Harmony Grove, Ga. Vella died one year later. Next to be born was Gilder Webb in September 1889, Blondine Webb in April 1891, Cymenthia Webb in 1895 (she died in 1896), Gertrelle Webb in November 1896, and Alton Americus Webb in 1904.
It's uncertain how long Voil's education lasted; son Robert S. Webb believes Voil didn't get beyond grade school in Commerce (it's unlikely the town had a high school at the turn of the last century) and might have supplemented his learning by attending night school-type classes at Georgia Tech once he moved to Atlanta. It's not quite known how he settled on a career, but we do know that by the time of the 1910 census he was listing his profession as bricklayer. Not long after, he moved to Atlanta and quickly saw his life change.
Toccoa Stop
Voil lost his father in 1909, when he was 21. Just a year before, northeast of Commerce on the railroad line, a 15-year-old girl lost her mother and quickly saw her life change, too. Her name was Annie Richard Stephens.
Annie was the fifth of six children of James Cannon Stephens and Sarah Haygood. Family tales say James' real name was James O'Cannon and that he was adopted by the Stephens family. But census records suggest his family had lived in the South since at least the late 1700s, when a man named Cannon Stephens was born in North Carolina. (That's logical if the name Stephens turns out to be Scottish in origin. Many Scots emigrated to North Carolina after Bonnie Prince Charlie's failed uprising in 1745. Stephens also is a popular English name.)
Records suggest Cannon moved to South Carolina, where eldest son Warren W. Stephens was born, and then to Georgia, where several other sons arrived. Sometime in the mid-1850s, Warren married a Tennessee-born woman named Margaret and, in September 1858, the couple welcomed James Cannon Stephens into the family. The child joined with father and grandfather to move again a few years later, this time to Dahlonega, the former gold-strike capital that by the 1870s suffered from played-out veins. Warren kept the family fed by working as a butcher.
Sometime during the 1870s, James Cannon Stephens took a job as a conductor with what became the Southern Railway. One day while stopping at cooling station that became the town of Toccoa, the story goes, he alighted from the train, saw a girl named Sarah Haygood and immediately was smitten.
Those familiar with family stories say the Haygoods were Cherokee Indians and thus we all have some Indian blood in us. That's possible, because Toccoa is located just east of the Cherokee lands (Catawbas actually were the tribe that live near Toccoa.) However, the 1870 census that shows Sarah, her mother and likely grandmother list all three as white. But that might be so because Indians in Georgia were keeping a low profile in those days; after all, the "Trail of Tears" in which Cherokees were forced out of their homeland and forced to move west had taken place just a few decades before.
James Cannon Stephens was only about 19 and Sarah Haygood only 16 or 17 when they first met. They married in 1878, settling in Toccoa. Their first child, Warren Floyd, was born in 1878. Next came Addie Elizabeth ("Lizzie") in October 1879, followed by Maggie in 1885, Pauline in 1888, Art ("Artie") in 1891, Annie Richard in March 1893, and James in 1897.
Like Voil, Annie grew up in a small, freshly minted mining town. Toccoa had been incorporated only three years before James and Sarah were married.
Then, sometime between 1897 and 1908, Annie's mother died; family legend says it was from tuberculosis.
At this point, James Cannon Stephens did a curious thing. Sometime between 1908 and 1910, it appears that he handed over his entire family to be cared for by daughter Lizzie, who in 1903 had married a man named George Leonard Tarrant and who was living in Atlanta. James Cannon Stephens then moved to Spartanburg, where he stayed a widower for fewer than two years. He married Mary Magdalene Harrill McNamary, and on Feb. 1, 1911, she gave birth to a son named David Lemond Stephens. Three months later, James Cannon Stephens was dead.
The news probably was delivered to 152 Ormond St. in Atlanta, where eight people resided, Leonard and Lizzie Tarrant; their son, Harry; and Lizzie's siblings Maggie, Pauline, Artie, Annie and James Stephens. According to the 1910 census, Maggie was a seamstress, Pauline and Annie worked as milliners at a wholesale hatmaking establishment, Artie was a saleslady at a dry good store, and James was in school. (Annie, aged 16, had just entered the workforce after having been in school all of 1909.) The Stephens, now bereft of parents, were finding their way in the big city. Soon Voil Webb would, too.
Grady Voil Webb and his siblings represent several significant shifts in Webb family history. The five children who lived to adulthood--Voil, Gertrelle, Blondine, Gilder and Alton--all were born in a small town, but Voil and Gilder moved to big cities (Atlanta and Philadelphia), while Blondine and Gertrelle were he first to go to college. And from a family that had been signing its papers with an "X" came not only the initial signs of education, but also of artistic creativity.
Voil and twin sister Vella were the first children of Americus Stephens and Martha Lucinda Wills Webb, arriving in February 1888 in Harmony Grove, Ga. Vella died one year later. Next to be born was Gilder Webb in September 1889, Blondine Webb in April 1891, Cymenthia Webb in 1895 (she died in 1896), Gertrelle Webb in November 1896, and Alton Americus Webb in 1904.
It's uncertain how long Voil's education lasted; son Robert S. Webb believes Voil didn't get beyond grade school in Commerce (it's unlikely the town had a high school at the turn of the last century) and might have supplemented his learning by attending night school-type classes at Georgia Tech once he moved to Atlanta. It's not quite known how he settled on a career, but we do know that by the time of the 1910 census he was listing his profession as bricklayer. Not long after, he moved to Atlanta and quickly saw his life change.
Toccoa Stop
Voil lost his father in 1909, when he was 21. Just a year before, northeast of Commerce on the railroad line, a 15-year-old girl lost her mother and quickly saw her life change, too. Her name was Annie Richard Stephens.
Annie was the fifth of six children of James Cannon Stephens and Sarah Haygood. Family tales say James' real name was James O'Cannon and that he was adopted by the Stephens family. But census records suggest his family had lived in the South since at least the late 1700s, when a man named Cannon Stephens was born in North Carolina. (That's logical if the name Stephens turns out to be Scottish in origin. Many Scots emigrated to North Carolina after Bonnie Prince Charlie's failed uprising in 1745. Stephens also is a popular English name.)
Records suggest Cannon moved to South Carolina, where eldest son Warren W. Stephens was born, and then to Georgia, where several other sons arrived. Sometime in the mid-1850s, Warren married a Tennessee-born woman named Margaret and, in September 1858, the couple welcomed James Cannon Stephens into the family. The child joined with father and grandfather to move again a few years later, this time to Dahlonega, the former gold-strike capital that by the 1870s suffered from played-out veins. Warren kept the family fed by working as a butcher.
Sometime during the 1870s, James Cannon Stephens took a job as a conductor with what became the Southern Railway. One day while stopping at cooling station that became the town of Toccoa, the story goes, he alighted from the train, saw a girl named Sarah Haygood and immediately was smitten.
Those familiar with family stories say the Haygoods were Cherokee Indians and thus we all have some Indian blood in us. That's possible, because Toccoa is located just east of the Cherokee lands (Catawbas actually were the tribe that live near Toccoa.) However, the 1870 census that shows Sarah, her mother and likely grandmother list all three as white. But that might be so because Indians in Georgia were keeping a low profile in those days; after all, the "Trail of Tears" in which Cherokees were forced out of their homeland and forced to move west had taken place just a few decades before.
James Cannon Stephens was only about 19 and Sarah Haygood only 16 or 17 when they first met. They married in 1878, settling in Toccoa. Their first child, Warren Floyd, was born in 1878. Next came Addie Elizabeth ("Lizzie") in October 1879, followed by Maggie in 1885, Pauline in 1888, Art ("Artie") in 1891, Annie Richard in March 1893, and James in 1897.
Like Voil, Annie grew up in a small, freshly minted mining town. Toccoa had been incorporated only three years before James and Sarah were married.
Then, sometime between 1897 and 1908, Annie's mother died; family legend says it was from tuberculosis.
At this point, James Cannon Stephens did a curious thing. Sometime between 1908 and 1910, it appears that he handed over his entire family to be cared for by daughter Lizzie, who in 1903 had married a man named George Leonard Tarrant and who was living in Atlanta. James Cannon Stephens then moved to Spartanburg, where he stayed a widower for fewer than two years. He married Mary Magdalene Harrill McNamary, and on Feb. 1, 1911, she gave birth to a son named David Lemond Stephens. Three months later, James Cannon Stephens was dead.
The news probably was delivered to 152 Ormond St. in Atlanta, where eight people resided, Leonard and Lizzie Tarrant; their son, Harry; and Lizzie's siblings Maggie, Pauline, Artie, Annie and James Stephens. According to the 1910 census, Maggie was a seamstress, Pauline and Annie worked as milliners at a wholesale hatmaking establishment, Artie was a saleslady at a dry good store, and James was in school. (Annie, aged 16, had just entered the workforce after having been in school all of 1909.) The Stephens, now bereft of parents, were finding their way in the big city. Soon Voil Webb would, too.
No Exit (Commerce, 1909)
Sometime in 1909, Americus learned he was suffering from a disease. Family legend says it was pernicious anemia, a disease of the red blood cells caused by a lack of vitamin B12. Again according to family tales, even in 1909 there were cures known for this disease, but Americus appeared to have become depressed that, because of the disease, he would end up like his brothers, who had suffered for decades from injuries suffered in the Civil War.
Fortunatus, for instance, had filed a pension application in 1905 that ticked off a variety of problems. One affidavit declares: "This applicant is very much enfeebled from age, complaints of rheumatism, and hemorrhoids. Also complains from diabetes."
Rather than faced that future, the story goes, Walton killed himself. We don't know the method of suicide, but we do know he died July 29, 1909.
Martha Lucinda Webb thus was widowed. She stayed that way for the next 24 years, dying Feb. 27, 1933.
Americus, Martha, and infants Vella and Cymenthia are buried in Gary Hill Cemetery in Commerce. About 50 yards away lies the grave of Olive Ann Burns, author of Cold Sassy Tree. Her story of life in Harmony Grove between 1905 and 1910 includes a suicide. I've always wonder if that's more than just a coincidence.
Fortunatus, for instance, had filed a pension application in 1905 that ticked off a variety of problems. One affidavit declares: "This applicant is very much enfeebled from age, complaints of rheumatism, and hemorrhoids. Also complains from diabetes."
Rather than faced that future, the story goes, Walton killed himself. We don't know the method of suicide, but we do know he died July 29, 1909.
Martha Lucinda Webb thus was widowed. She stayed that way for the next 24 years, dying Feb. 27, 1933.
Americus, Martha, and infants Vella and Cymenthia are buried in Gary Hill Cemetery in Commerce. About 50 yards away lies the grave of Olive Ann Burns, author of Cold Sassy Tree. Her story of life in Harmony Grove between 1905 and 1910 includes a suicide. I've always wonder if that's more than just a coincidence.
Harmony Grove (1870-1909)
By 1847, Americus was 14 years old and working on his father's farm in Harris County, Ga. Only about seven of the original 17 Webbs were on the farm at the time, but brother Fortunatus was next door and brothers Joseph and Alexander Webb shared a farm two doors away. We don't know what happened next to Americus, but it appears that eventually he took to carpentry, left the farm and left Harris County.
It's not known if he wandered or took a straight line, but Americus ended up in Harmony Grove, Ga., about 60 miles northeast of Atlanta in Jackson County. It came to life largely as the result of being a stop for the local railroad; its corporate limits were defined as one mile in each direction from the depot. Today it's known as Commerce, and it's best known to Georgians as an exit off Interstate 85 that's loaded with outlet malls. But when it was founded in December 1844, it had just 579 residents.
Eventually, at least five of the Webb brothers--Americus, Fortunatus, Alexander, Luther and one brother whom I cannot identify--settled in and around Harmony Grove. We don't know who came first, but we do know they came before the town was incorporated. A March 24, 1883, letters to a Harriett Deadwyler in Harmony Grove from a Teresa Deadwyler living in Texas asks that Harriett "give my love to Aunt Susie Webb's family." Susie refers to Americus' mother, Susannah Deadwyler Webb.
Marriage in Harmony Grove
We know Americus was in Harmony Grove by 1886, because that's when he married Martha Lucinda Wills. She was born in October 1861, roughly 10 months after her parents got married and only eight months before her father died while fighting for the Confederacy. Despite that rough start, Martha belonged to what passed for gentry in the village, as her subsequent step-father was a part of the Hardman family that organized Harmony Grove Mills Inc. in 1893. A Hardman from Harmony Grove served as a governor of Georgia, while many of Martha's direct ancestors were pioneers of Jackson County. One line even goes back to the brother of President Zachary Taylor, which means that this family's two Zachary Taylor Webbs have good reason to take that name.
There also was an ancestor named Martha Diane Pittman (Martha Lucinda Wills' paternal grandmother) who, according to a newspaper clipping, rode horseback with her year-old child (probably Martin Lafayette Wills, who was Martha Lucinda's father) through northeast Georgia to visit her parents. "She was gone about three monhs, and the only news her husband had of her was through the Indians, who reported her safe passage through their villages," according to a newspaper clipping based upon reports by Martha's grandchildren. "She often told her granddaughters that her 'back-board afforded her much benefit on this long ride,' the back-board being a thin, plaint board shaped to fit the spine, with a row of holes on each side, by which it was fastened to a tight-fitting bodice. Evidently a fore-runner of (corset) stays."
Cold Sassy Life
The 1900 census for Harmony Grove lists Americus' profession as a carpenter, but unemployed for the prior two months. It's possible that he had come to help build housing for the textile mill
workers and their families.
Harmony Grove was a typical mill town, the kind of place where everybody knew everybody else. An while it was exemplifying the kind of New South reconstructionism that Henry Grady was promoting in the Atlanta newspapers, a lot of Old South resentments lingered. According to the book Cold Sassy Tree, a fictional romance based on Harmony Grove, the Fourth of July--honoring a concept of independence that these Georgians, in their own way, tried and failed to achieve--wasn't celebrated in Harmony Grove until 40 years after Appomattox.
According to a July 1996 interview with Dr. Charles Owen, grandson of Martha Wills, the original house in Commerce that Americus and Martha lived in burned down. In the new house, "she had a chicken yard in back and troughs were carved out of soapstone," Owen said. "It was a big house down on the corner in which ex-Gov. Hardman lived. He'd make apple cider in his garage."
The descriptions of live provided by Americus' daughter Gertrell, as well as by grandchildren who remembered life there in the 1930s, give extra credence to the descriptions of Turn of the Century life that Commerce native Olive Ann Burns sets down in Cold Sassy Tree.
Wrote Gertrell: "My father had five brothers in Commerce and when I was very small there was lots of visiting. My father would not ... object to my mother taking us five children to Sunday School and church and when we got back home he would have the house in perfect shape and a delicious dinner on the table." (Notes: The family might have raised its children as Baptists, but Americus apparently wasn't a regular.)
"He always had a pretty house and buggy and on Sunday afternoon he would go to see his brothers," Gertrell continued. "He was a good conversationalist and story teller. Some of the stories he told me when I was a child amazed me. He always got me dressed for school, parting my hair in the middle and making two plaits that never came loose. Tied the ends with ribbon.
One of the most useful things he ever gave me was a blackboard that fastened to a wall. It had a roller at the top and I could roll it to learn my ABCs [and] then to read, turn another turn and it was arithmetic. It had chalk and an eraser and a chair to sit in.
"He left all the controlling of his children to mom," Gertrell added. "He would say 'Ask your mother and is she says you can it is all right with me.' She ruled us with an iron hand and not a one went bad. She said she had never head of a Webb girl getting into anything bad."
Americus and Martha had seven children, beginning with twins named Voil (actually Grady Voil) and Vella in February 1888. Vella died a year later. September 1889 saw the arrival of Martin Gilder Webb, followed by Blondine in April 1891, Cymenthia in 1895 (she died in 1896), Gertrelle in November 1896 and Alton Americus in 1904.
It's not known if he wandered or took a straight line, but Americus ended up in Harmony Grove, Ga., about 60 miles northeast of Atlanta in Jackson County. It came to life largely as the result of being a stop for the local railroad; its corporate limits were defined as one mile in each direction from the depot. Today it's known as Commerce, and it's best known to Georgians as an exit off Interstate 85 that's loaded with outlet malls. But when it was founded in December 1844, it had just 579 residents.
Eventually, at least five of the Webb brothers--Americus, Fortunatus, Alexander, Luther and one brother whom I cannot identify--settled in and around Harmony Grove. We don't know who came first, but we do know they came before the town was incorporated. A March 24, 1883, letters to a Harriett Deadwyler in Harmony Grove from a Teresa Deadwyler living in Texas asks that Harriett "give my love to Aunt Susie Webb's family." Susie refers to Americus' mother, Susannah Deadwyler Webb.
Marriage in Harmony Grove
We know Americus was in Harmony Grove by 1886, because that's when he married Martha Lucinda Wills. She was born in October 1861, roughly 10 months after her parents got married and only eight months before her father died while fighting for the Confederacy. Despite that rough start, Martha belonged to what passed for gentry in the village, as her subsequent step-father was a part of the Hardman family that organized Harmony Grove Mills Inc. in 1893. A Hardman from Harmony Grove served as a governor of Georgia, while many of Martha's direct ancestors were pioneers of Jackson County. One line even goes back to the brother of President Zachary Taylor, which means that this family's two Zachary Taylor Webbs have good reason to take that name.
There also was an ancestor named Martha Diane Pittman (Martha Lucinda Wills' paternal grandmother) who, according to a newspaper clipping, rode horseback with her year-old child (probably Martin Lafayette Wills, who was Martha Lucinda's father) through northeast Georgia to visit her parents. "She was gone about three monhs, and the only news her husband had of her was through the Indians, who reported her safe passage through their villages," according to a newspaper clipping based upon reports by Martha's grandchildren. "She often told her granddaughters that her 'back-board afforded her much benefit on this long ride,' the back-board being a thin, plaint board shaped to fit the spine, with a row of holes on each side, by which it was fastened to a tight-fitting bodice. Evidently a fore-runner of (corset) stays."
Cold Sassy Life
The 1900 census for Harmony Grove lists Americus' profession as a carpenter, but unemployed for the prior two months. It's possible that he had come to help build housing for the textile mill
workers and their families.
Harmony Grove was a typical mill town, the kind of place where everybody knew everybody else. An while it was exemplifying the kind of New South reconstructionism that Henry Grady was promoting in the Atlanta newspapers, a lot of Old South resentments lingered. According to the book Cold Sassy Tree, a fictional romance based on Harmony Grove, the Fourth of July--honoring a concept of independence that these Georgians, in their own way, tried and failed to achieve--wasn't celebrated in Harmony Grove until 40 years after Appomattox.
According to a July 1996 interview with Dr. Charles Owen, grandson of Martha Wills, the original house in Commerce that Americus and Martha lived in burned down. In the new house, "she had a chicken yard in back and troughs were carved out of soapstone," Owen said. "It was a big house down on the corner in which ex-Gov. Hardman lived. He'd make apple cider in his garage."
The descriptions of live provided by Americus' daughter Gertrell, as well as by grandchildren who remembered life there in the 1930s, give extra credence to the descriptions of Turn of the Century life that Commerce native Olive Ann Burns sets down in Cold Sassy Tree.
Wrote Gertrell: "My father had five brothers in Commerce and when I was very small there was lots of visiting. My father would not ... object to my mother taking us five children to Sunday School and church and when we got back home he would have the house in perfect shape and a delicious dinner on the table." (Notes: The family might have raised its children as Baptists, but Americus apparently wasn't a regular.)
"He always had a pretty house and buggy and on Sunday afternoon he would go to see his brothers," Gertrell continued. "He was a good conversationalist and story teller. Some of the stories he told me when I was a child amazed me. He always got me dressed for school, parting my hair in the middle and making two plaits that never came loose. Tied the ends with ribbon.
One of the most useful things he ever gave me was a blackboard that fastened to a wall. It had a roller at the top and I could roll it to learn my ABCs [and] then to read, turn another turn and it was arithmetic. It had chalk and an eraser and a chair to sit in.
"He left all the controlling of his children to mom," Gertrell added. "He would say 'Ask your mother and is she says you can it is all right with me.' She ruled us with an iron hand and not a one went bad. She said she had never head of a Webb girl getting into anything bad."
Americus and Martha had seven children, beginning with twins named Voil (actually Grady Voil) and Vella in February 1888. Vella died a year later. September 1889 saw the arrival of Martin Gilder Webb, followed by Blondine in April 1891, Cymenthia in 1895 (she died in 1896), Gertrelle in November 1896 and Alton Americus in 1904.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Rebel Yell (Georgia, 1855-1870)
War and Remembrance
Americus Stephens Webb was a child of the Civil War and, arguably, one of its last victims.
The 15th child of Walton Polk and Susannah Deadwyler Webb, he was at an impressionable age when Union soldiers, tailing back from Sherman's March to the Sea, ransacked his homeland. Decades later, his modest success--in part by marrying well -- led his brothers to join him in a small town northeast of Atlanta. And when he learned he had fallen ill with what appeared to be a debilitating illness, family legend has it that he chose to kill himself rather than end up as crippled as the Confederate veterans in his family.
Americus Stephens Webb was born Jan. 21, 1856, to a family on the move. Like many before them, Walton and Susannah had decided to leave the Elbert County farmland where they had been born and raised, had married and had produced 14 children. It's not certain whether they had hit the road by Americus' birthday, but given the rough highways of the day, one would think that Susannah wouldn't have wanted to ride a wagon while heavy with child.
No records that I've seen indicate how Americus got his name. Perhaps it was a political statement at a time when emotions over slavery and states' rights were white-hot. (Walton didn't own slaves then, but then again most Southerners didn't, and the two parts of Georgia where he lived tended to have fewer slaves than other regions of the state.) The middle name, Stephens, could have come in honor of Alexander Hamilton "Little Alec" Stephens, a noted Georgia politicians. It could have been a political statement as well--Stephens opposed secession but nevertheless became vice president of the Confederacy.
In any case, by the time Americus was four years old he was living with his family in Beula, Ala., just across the border from Georgia. Four doors away in one direction was Walton's brother, John B. Webb Jr., a carpenter. Four doors in the other direction took him to Americus' elder brother, Fortunatus Webb, who was becoming a cabinet maker.
Battle Tested, Battle Weary
At least two of Americus' brothers and one brother-in-law fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. None emerged intact.
Brother Philip Elcain (also known as Elkana) Webb was a member of the "Mountain Tigers"-- the 31st Regiment of the Georgia Volunteer Infantry. According to a descendant named Earnest Deadwyler (yes, more evidence of Webbs and Deadwylers intermarrying, this time in Harris County), Philip joined in November 1861 and fought with the Army of Northern Virginia. His wartime experiences included participation at Gettysburg where, as a member of Gordon's Brigade, Jubal Early's Division, Richard Ewell's III Corps, he was deployed on the Confederate left flank to the north and east of the city when Early's division attacked through the eastern outskirts of the city southward to Cemetery Hill.
On Feb. 6, 1865, Philip was wounded in the right leg and suffered a permanent disability in Hatcher's Run, Va. He was captured near Petersburg, Va., a month later and wasn't released until June 22, several months after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. According to a record in the Georgia State Archives, Philip had dark complexion, brown hair, hazel eyes and was 5 feet 9-3/4 inches tall.
Another brother, Fortunatus Webb, joined the Confederate Army in April 1862 and was attached to Hilliard's Legion of Alabama. In 1863, the legion was consolidated and attached to Grove's Brigade of the 60th Alabama Battalion. It also served mainly in Virginia. According to a pension application that Fortunatus filed in 1906, sometime before April 1865 he suffered an injury in which "my ankle was knocked out of joint and am disabled." Much of 1864 was spent in and around Petersburg, Va., so the injury is likely to have taken place there.
James Moultrie, husband of Americus' sister Victoria, also was a veteran, serving in Company E, 20th Regiment, Georgia Volunteer Infantry of the Army of Northern Virginia. He was discharged on Oct. 17, 1861, roughly four months after enlisting, suffering from an unnamed disability.
Even if his brothers hadn't been in the war, the war would have touched Americus. By the mid-1860s, Walton and several of his children had moved back into Georgia and settled in Harris County, located hard by the Alabama border. No major battles were fought in the area, but following Sherman's March to the Sea, some of his troops circled back through the state and went up the Chattahoochee River, raiding and burning. In addition, on April 16, 1865--two days after Lincoln was assassinated--a Union cavalry force captured West Point and Columbus, Ga., just south of Harris County.
According to Americus' daughter Gertrelle, the eldest brother of Americus--Jeptha Webb--was living in Harris County and had racing horses. "The Yankees came by and stole all their horses," she wrote. "They had been offered $3,000.00 for the horses they stole and this wiped them [out]." What she doesn't note was that Jeptha, a lifelong bachelor, is listed in the census as living with Walton--and Americus--in both 1860 and 1870. Thus, it's likely that when the Yankees attacked (if they attacked) they came to where Americus was living.
Americus Stephens Webb was a child of the Civil War and, arguably, one of its last victims.
The 15th child of Walton Polk and Susannah Deadwyler Webb, he was at an impressionable age when Union soldiers, tailing back from Sherman's March to the Sea, ransacked his homeland. Decades later, his modest success--in part by marrying well -- led his brothers to join him in a small town northeast of Atlanta. And when he learned he had fallen ill with what appeared to be a debilitating illness, family legend has it that he chose to kill himself rather than end up as crippled as the Confederate veterans in his family.
Americus Stephens Webb was born Jan. 21, 1856, to a family on the move. Like many before them, Walton and Susannah had decided to leave the Elbert County farmland where they had been born and raised, had married and had produced 14 children. It's not certain whether they had hit the road by Americus' birthday, but given the rough highways of the day, one would think that Susannah wouldn't have wanted to ride a wagon while heavy with child.
No records that I've seen indicate how Americus got his name. Perhaps it was a political statement at a time when emotions over slavery and states' rights were white-hot. (Walton didn't own slaves then, but then again most Southerners didn't, and the two parts of Georgia where he lived tended to have fewer slaves than other regions of the state.) The middle name, Stephens, could have come in honor of Alexander Hamilton "Little Alec" Stephens, a noted Georgia politicians. It could have been a political statement as well--Stephens opposed secession but nevertheless became vice president of the Confederacy.
In any case, by the time Americus was four years old he was living with his family in Beula, Ala., just across the border from Georgia. Four doors away in one direction was Walton's brother, John B. Webb Jr., a carpenter. Four doors in the other direction took him to Americus' elder brother, Fortunatus Webb, who was becoming a cabinet maker.
Battle Tested, Battle Weary
At least two of Americus' brothers and one brother-in-law fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. None emerged intact.
Brother Philip Elcain (also known as Elkana) Webb was a member of the "Mountain Tigers"-- the 31st Regiment of the Georgia Volunteer Infantry. According to a descendant named Earnest Deadwyler (yes, more evidence of Webbs and Deadwylers intermarrying, this time in Harris County), Philip joined in November 1861 and fought with the Army of Northern Virginia. His wartime experiences included participation at Gettysburg where, as a member of Gordon's Brigade, Jubal Early's Division, Richard Ewell's III Corps, he was deployed on the Confederate left flank to the north and east of the city when Early's division attacked through the eastern outskirts of the city southward to Cemetery Hill.
On Feb. 6, 1865, Philip was wounded in the right leg and suffered a permanent disability in Hatcher's Run, Va. He was captured near Petersburg, Va., a month later and wasn't released until June 22, several months after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. According to a record in the Georgia State Archives, Philip had dark complexion, brown hair, hazel eyes and was 5 feet 9-3/4 inches tall.
Another brother, Fortunatus Webb, joined the Confederate Army in April 1862 and was attached to Hilliard's Legion of Alabama. In 1863, the legion was consolidated and attached to Grove's Brigade of the 60th Alabama Battalion. It also served mainly in Virginia. According to a pension application that Fortunatus filed in 1906, sometime before April 1865 he suffered an injury in which "my ankle was knocked out of joint and am disabled." Much of 1864 was spent in and around Petersburg, Va., so the injury is likely to have taken place there.
James Moultrie, husband of Americus' sister Victoria, also was a veteran, serving in Company E, 20th Regiment, Georgia Volunteer Infantry of the Army of Northern Virginia. He was discharged on Oct. 17, 1861, roughly four months after enlisting, suffering from an unnamed disability.
Even if his brothers hadn't been in the war, the war would have touched Americus. By the mid-1860s, Walton and several of his children had moved back into Georgia and settled in Harris County, located hard by the Alabama border. No major battles were fought in the area, but following Sherman's March to the Sea, some of his troops circled back through the state and went up the Chattahoochee River, raiding and burning. In addition, on April 16, 1865--two days after Lincoln was assassinated--a Union cavalry force captured West Point and Columbus, Ga., just south of Harris County.
According to Americus' daughter Gertrelle, the eldest brother of Americus--Jeptha Webb--was living in Harris County and had racing horses. "The Yankees came by and stole all their horses," she wrote. "They had been offered $3,000.00 for the horses they stole and this wiped them [out]." What she doesn't note was that Jeptha, a lifelong bachelor, is listed in the census as living with Walton--and Americus--in both 1860 and 1870. Thus, it's likely that when the Yankees attacked (if they attacked) they came to where Americus was living.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Moving West (Georgia and Alabama, 1850-1880)
By 1850, Elbert County, Ga., had nearly 13,000 citizens split roughly 50-50 between free whites and black slaves. In general, the Webbs did not appear to be big slaveholders. For example, the 1830 census for Walton Polk Webb's residence lists one female slave, aged 10-24, but none were identified in the 1840 or 1850 censuses. It's possible that the family's rapidly growing size made slaveowning unnecessary, as there were plenty of children of both sexes to do chores. Elbert County families also had a tendency to own fewer slaves, and were less likely to have a slave to begin with, than did whites in other parts of the South, particularly those whites who farmed areas that required large numbers of laborers.
By the late 1840s, one would think that Walton and Susannah could be safely described as settled down. After all, in 1848 Walton purchased 216-1/4 acres of land on Falling Creek from a Valentine H. Deadwyler. And by the 1850 census, he and Susannah had 12 children in the house, from 22-year-old Jane to 3-year-old Victoria. But in the mid-1850s, something happened that caused Walton and Susannah to leave town.
On Feb. 18, 1855, this appears in the minutes for Dove's Creek Baptist Church: "Cald conference. Application made for letters of dismission from Bro. W.P. Webb and sister Susan T. Webb and Jane M. Webb, all of which was granted." That same year, the land that Walton had purchased in 1848 was sold to Ira Christian.
Why would a man and wife pull up stakes when they are in their mid-40s? The more cold-blooded in the genealogy game might suggest a scandal of some sort. Certainly, given that daughter Jane was in her early 20s and mother Susannah in her mid-40s when Americus was born, it's possible that Jane was the real mother and that the family was leaving town to avoid gossips. On the other hand, a variety of records taken down 50 and even 75 years ago don't vary in suggesting that Walton and Susannah were Americus' parents. In addition, family history experts say a lot more women in their 40s had children in those days than we might expect.
And there's another reason: lots of other people were leaving Elbert County aside from the Webbs. Land grants in newly opened central Georgia counties that were given to Revolutionary War soldiers had long served to limit Elbert County's population to modest levels. Then, between 1850 and 1860, the county's population dropped about 19%. Perhaps by then the topsoil had been drained of nutrition by tobacco. And the ground wasn't really all that fertile anyway; Elbert County eventually became known as the Granite Capital of the World.
New Country
Walton was likely to have been inspired by stories from his relatives regarding what they were finding even further out West than central Georgia. In 1826, a treaty with 13 Creek Indian chiefs ceded all lands east of the Chattahoochee River (which forms part of the Georgia-Alabama border) to the United States. In April 1839, Rock Springs Baptist Church was founded in Chambers County, Ala., near the Georgia border. One of its 12 charter members was Abner Webb of Elbert County, a cousin of Walton. In addition, the 1850 census for Harris County, Ga., pretty much across the line from Chambers County, Ala., shows Walton's brother John B. Webb Jr. as a resident.
In 1860, Walton and family were listed in the decennial census as living in Chambers County, Ala. This is the first census in which Americus Stephens appears. Considering that he was born in January 1856 and his birthplace is listed as Georgia, it's probable that he was born in Elbert County before the family went west.
They didn't stay too long, however. Walton's granddaughter Gertrelle Webb Crews said in her various records that the family owned a farm in Harris County that was touched by the Civil War. This suggests a move back into Georgia in the early 1860s. By the 1870 census, Walton was listed as living in Harris County on real estate worth $4,500 and with property worth $675. He was 61 and Susannah was 60. Only four children remained at home, but son Fortunatus was next door, sons Joseph and Alexander were two doors down, and son Philip Elcain (identified then as Elkana) was three doors away.
Age no doubt was beginning to take its toll on Walton. On March 9, 1878, W.P. Webb sold 100 acres of land to P.E. Webb for $500. (P.E. is probably Philip Elcain Webb, his son.) The land is described as "lying east of the said lot that Grew S. Duke's grist mill is on and south side of said lot the Mulberry Creek running through the same there being one hundred acres of it." According to Philip's direct descendant, Earnest Deadwyler, this is probably part of a 334-acre spread in the area that came to be known as Benshoe. Philip Elcain held the land until his death in 1914. If there ever was a Webb family farm that a Webb acquired rather than inherited or took in by marriage, this was it.
After selling his land, Walton and Susannah (along with Jeptha, a lifelong bachelor) moved in with Walton and Susannah's daughter Victoria and new husband James Moultrie into a house in the Blue Springs District of Harris County. Blue Springs is believed to be one of the areas that later formed Callaway Gardens, a 14,000-acre resort. At 72, Walton quite likely was the oldest Webb in the entire state, and Susannah at 71 years old vied for No. 2.
We don't know when and where Walton and Susanah died or where they are buried. One guess is in a county north of Harris, because Victoria and James Moultrie eventually moved there. The 1890 census is no help because it was destroyed by fire. It does appear clear, however, that given their long lives and ability to survive war, disease and tough farming conditions--and produce 15 children along the way--Walton and Susannah Webb are marvels to contemplate.
By the late 1840s, one would think that Walton and Susannah could be safely described as settled down. After all, in 1848 Walton purchased 216-1/4 acres of land on Falling Creek from a Valentine H. Deadwyler. And by the 1850 census, he and Susannah had 12 children in the house, from 22-year-old Jane to 3-year-old Victoria. But in the mid-1850s, something happened that caused Walton and Susannah to leave town.
On Feb. 18, 1855, this appears in the minutes for Dove's Creek Baptist Church: "Cald conference. Application made for letters of dismission from Bro. W.P. Webb and sister Susan T. Webb and Jane M. Webb, all of which was granted." That same year, the land that Walton had purchased in 1848 was sold to Ira Christian.
Why would a man and wife pull up stakes when they are in their mid-40s? The more cold-blooded in the genealogy game might suggest a scandal of some sort. Certainly, given that daughter Jane was in her early 20s and mother Susannah in her mid-40s when Americus was born, it's possible that Jane was the real mother and that the family was leaving town to avoid gossips. On the other hand, a variety of records taken down 50 and even 75 years ago don't vary in suggesting that Walton and Susannah were Americus' parents. In addition, family history experts say a lot more women in their 40s had children in those days than we might expect.
And there's another reason: lots of other people were leaving Elbert County aside from the Webbs. Land grants in newly opened central Georgia counties that were given to Revolutionary War soldiers had long served to limit Elbert County's population to modest levels. Then, between 1850 and 1860, the county's population dropped about 19%. Perhaps by then the topsoil had been drained of nutrition by tobacco. And the ground wasn't really all that fertile anyway; Elbert County eventually became known as the Granite Capital of the World.
New Country
Walton was likely to have been inspired by stories from his relatives regarding what they were finding even further out West than central Georgia. In 1826, a treaty with 13 Creek Indian chiefs ceded all lands east of the Chattahoochee River (which forms part of the Georgia-Alabama border) to the United States. In April 1839, Rock Springs Baptist Church was founded in Chambers County, Ala., near the Georgia border. One of its 12 charter members was Abner Webb of Elbert County, a cousin of Walton. In addition, the 1850 census for Harris County, Ga., pretty much across the line from Chambers County, Ala., shows Walton's brother John B. Webb Jr. as a resident.
In 1860, Walton and family were listed in the decennial census as living in Chambers County, Ala. This is the first census in which Americus Stephens appears. Considering that he was born in January 1856 and his birthplace is listed as Georgia, it's probable that he was born in Elbert County before the family went west.
They didn't stay too long, however. Walton's granddaughter Gertrelle Webb Crews said in her various records that the family owned a farm in Harris County that was touched by the Civil War. This suggests a move back into Georgia in the early 1860s. By the 1870 census, Walton was listed as living in Harris County on real estate worth $4,500 and with property worth $675. He was 61 and Susannah was 60. Only four children remained at home, but son Fortunatus was next door, sons Joseph and Alexander were two doors down, and son Philip Elcain (identified then as Elkana) was three doors away.
Age no doubt was beginning to take its toll on Walton. On March 9, 1878, W.P. Webb sold 100 acres of land to P.E. Webb for $500. (P.E. is probably Philip Elcain Webb, his son.) The land is described as "lying east of the said lot that Grew S. Duke's grist mill is on and south side of said lot the Mulberry Creek running through the same there being one hundred acres of it." According to Philip's direct descendant, Earnest Deadwyler, this is probably part of a 334-acre spread in the area that came to be known as Benshoe. Philip Elcain held the land until his death in 1914. If there ever was a Webb family farm that a Webb acquired rather than inherited or took in by marriage, this was it.
After selling his land, Walton and Susannah (along with Jeptha, a lifelong bachelor) moved in with Walton and Susannah's daughter Victoria and new husband James Moultrie into a house in the Blue Springs District of Harris County. Blue Springs is believed to be one of the areas that later formed Callaway Gardens, a 14,000-acre resort. At 72, Walton quite likely was the oldest Webb in the entire state, and Susannah at 71 years old vied for No. 2.
We don't know when and where Walton and Susanah died or where they are buried. One guess is in a county north of Harris, because Victoria and James Moultrie eventually moved there. The 1890 census is no help because it was destroyed by fire. It does appear clear, however, that given their long lives and ability to survive war, disease and tough farming conditions--and produce 15 children along the way--Walton and Susannah Webb are marvels to contemplate.
Shall We Gather by the River (Georgia, 1780-1850)
Settling in Georgia
It appears that our Webb ancestors began migrating sometime in the 1770s to an area in northwest Georgia lying between the Broad and the Savannah rivers. The land had been purchased from the Indians by the Georgia colony a few years previously, partly to cover the Indians' trading debts with the white settlers. In 1790, it was incorporated as Elbert County, in honor of the Revolutionary War soldier Gen. Samuel Elbert. But at the time the Webbs arrived, the area was still part of Wilkes County.
Various histories say that the first colonists came to the area where a group of Virginians that arrived toward the end of 1773, led by Stephen Heard and his brother Bernard Heard. The initial group might have included a couple named John Webb and Lucy Claiborne and their eight children. They are believed to be our direct ancestors.
One history of Elbert County suggests that the area "began to be populated by two types: fun-loving cavaliers from Virginia and more democratic and unpretentious types from North Carolina." Among the latter group was Martin Deadwyler, a native of Germany who came to the United States around 1780, settled in North Carolina for a half dozen years and then moved to then-Wilkes County sometime between 1784 and 1786. Also arriving about that time was a non-relative: a Baptist minister named Dozier Thornton.
The area's well-drained soil appeared idea for the production of brightleaf tobacco as well as cotton and peanuts--crops that no doubt would have been familiar to settlers from either colony. But while the native land appeared to be welcoming, the natives were not.
Revolution
Given the threat that the colonists posed, the indigenous tribes unsurprisingly tended to side with the British in the Revolutionary War. John McIntosh's History of Elbert County says that because of the Indians' role in the conflict, "What is now Elbert County territory ... suffered many wanton acts of barbarism. Dwellings were burned, crops destroyed, cattle spirited away, fathers murdered and mothers and children driven from their homes and, in many instances, slain and scalped. In truth, it was war to the axe, to the torch, and to the knife in the territory between the Savannah and Broad rivers."
The Federal Writers' Project history of Georgia portrays the Revolutionary War in the state in equally grisly terms. The war "was not one of planned strategic warfare, but of incessant guerrilla strife," it wrote. "With their means of communication cut off, the people had little knowledge of what the patriot forces were doing. A man would fight for a few weeks, hurry home to plant his crop, and then rush back to the military. Confiscation, plunder, torture and outright murder for revenge were common occurrences."
The Webbs were affected in several ways. John Webb's sons Austin, Claiborne and John Burrell (often called John B., and the whom we believe is our ancestor) all served in the Revolution, as evidenced by applications for pensions they filed years later. In his application, Austin confesses that he cannot confirm his believed birth date of Feb. 14, 1757, because "it was burnt in his father's house together with near all his father's property by the Tories." Austin served from February 1779 through around August 1781, and fought at the battle of Kettle Creek and at the first and second sieges of Augusta.
Meanwhile, a pension application filed by one Alexander Smith recounts his service at a Fort Nail in October 1780. "in the march out to the Okmulgee [River]," he wrote, "[we] trailed the track of a body of Cherokee Indians who had captured some three or four of the Webb family from Broad River settlement, Wilkes County. Never overtook the Indians to see them, although came on their fresh camp where their fires were left burning."
The application of John B. Webb, our likely direct ancestor, says he joined the Revolutionary Army around January 1777 and served a number of three-month hitches, mainly stationed at Fort Nail in Wilkes County on the Broad River. His initial service appeared to be relatively quiet until Aug. 25, 1778, when the Cherokees attacked the fort. The Indians didn't capture Fort Nail, John B.'s application says, but they did steal a number of horses, including "the first and only horse which this declarant then owned." Ten weeks later, Cherokees attacked Fort Nail again, this time capturing a nephew of John B. named Claiborne Bellamy.
John B. said he later fought in the Battle of Kettle Creek in Wilkes County on Feb. 14, 1779, as well as performed service in South Carolina. In August 1779 he was discharged with no reasonable chance of getting back to Georgia, so he reports he spent his time "staying as a Georgia refugee, sometime in Virginia and sometimes in North Carolina until the first day of May 1781 when, having been called for by Col. Elijah Clark, he the declarant started from Burke County in the state of North Carolina where he then was to come to the second siege of Augusta. But he was on the day and year last aforesaid shortly after starting thrown from his horse and arm and collarbone broken and his shoulder smashed by which misfortune he was entirely disabled from the performance of any more or further service whatsoever." Thus, in the summer of 1781, he went home. He was probably around 21 years old.
Baptists and Babies
We next hear from John B. sometime after October 1788, when the Rev. Dozier Thornton established Dove's Creek Baptist Church about four miles west of Elberton, the county seat. Among the church's members were John B. Webb, numerous other people with the Webb name, and Martin and Joseph Deadwyler. By 1801, tax digest records suggest the area was thick with Webbs--including a John Webb (possibly John B.'s father, but we can't be sure) who had two slaves and 100 acres of land. The region was nearly equally populated with Deadwylers.
On Oct. 18, 1806, Elbert County records register Burrell Webb as having married Sarah Booth. (One family history recorded before World War I lists the wife as Susan Ann Boothe.) They had 10 children: Fortunatus, Walton Polk, John B. Jr., Paine, Gaines, Washington, Patsy, Elsie, Barbara Angeline, and Elizabeth. Of these, Walton is without question our direct ancestor.
Walton Polk (also known by the family as Pope) Webb was born around 1808 or 1809. On Nov. 13, 1837, he married a fellow teenager named Susannah Deadwyler, a fellow parishioner at Dove's Creek and probably the daughter of Martin Deadwyler. Such unions were quite common in those days; at least a half dozen Webbs and Deadwylers married each other in Elbert County in the 1820s. There were so many Webbs in the area that one community was known as the Webbsboro District.
Walton and Susannah settled in the area, probably farming land that belonged to Susannah's father. They remained members of Dove's Creek Baptist Church, showing up on rosters in 1829 and 1846. There's no word regarding whether they were good farmers, but they certainly weren't any slouches at producing children; over the years they had about 15 of them. I say "about"because names, numbers and birth dates differ markedly depending on who did the recording. My research suggests their names and birth dates are:
It appears that our Webb ancestors began migrating sometime in the 1770s to an area in northwest Georgia lying between the Broad and the Savannah rivers. The land had been purchased from the Indians by the Georgia colony a few years previously, partly to cover the Indians' trading debts with the white settlers. In 1790, it was incorporated as Elbert County, in honor of the Revolutionary War soldier Gen. Samuel Elbert. But at the time the Webbs arrived, the area was still part of Wilkes County.
Various histories say that the first colonists came to the area where a group of Virginians that arrived toward the end of 1773, led by Stephen Heard and his brother Bernard Heard. The initial group might have included a couple named John Webb and Lucy Claiborne and their eight children. They are believed to be our direct ancestors.
One history of Elbert County suggests that the area "began to be populated by two types: fun-loving cavaliers from Virginia and more democratic and unpretentious types from North Carolina." Among the latter group was Martin Deadwyler, a native of Germany who came to the United States around 1780, settled in North Carolina for a half dozen years and then moved to then-Wilkes County sometime between 1784 and 1786. Also arriving about that time was a non-relative: a Baptist minister named Dozier Thornton.
The area's well-drained soil appeared idea for the production of brightleaf tobacco as well as cotton and peanuts--crops that no doubt would have been familiar to settlers from either colony. But while the native land appeared to be welcoming, the natives were not.
Revolution
Given the threat that the colonists posed, the indigenous tribes unsurprisingly tended to side with the British in the Revolutionary War. John McIntosh's History of Elbert County says that because of the Indians' role in the conflict, "What is now Elbert County territory ... suffered many wanton acts of barbarism. Dwellings were burned, crops destroyed, cattle spirited away, fathers murdered and mothers and children driven from their homes and, in many instances, slain and scalped. In truth, it was war to the axe, to the torch, and to the knife in the territory between the Savannah and Broad rivers."
The Federal Writers' Project history of Georgia portrays the Revolutionary War in the state in equally grisly terms. The war "was not one of planned strategic warfare, but of incessant guerrilla strife," it wrote. "With their means of communication cut off, the people had little knowledge of what the patriot forces were doing. A man would fight for a few weeks, hurry home to plant his crop, and then rush back to the military. Confiscation, plunder, torture and outright murder for revenge were common occurrences."
The Webbs were affected in several ways. John Webb's sons Austin, Claiborne and John Burrell (often called John B., and the whom we believe is our ancestor) all served in the Revolution, as evidenced by applications for pensions they filed years later. In his application, Austin confesses that he cannot confirm his believed birth date of Feb. 14, 1757, because "it was burnt in his father's house together with near all his father's property by the Tories." Austin served from February 1779 through around August 1781, and fought at the battle of Kettle Creek and at the first and second sieges of Augusta.
Meanwhile, a pension application filed by one Alexander Smith recounts his service at a Fort Nail in October 1780. "in the march out to the Okmulgee [River]," he wrote, "[we] trailed the track of a body of Cherokee Indians who had captured some three or four of the Webb family from Broad River settlement, Wilkes County. Never overtook the Indians to see them, although came on their fresh camp where their fires were left burning."
The application of John B. Webb, our likely direct ancestor, says he joined the Revolutionary Army around January 1777 and served a number of three-month hitches, mainly stationed at Fort Nail in Wilkes County on the Broad River. His initial service appeared to be relatively quiet until Aug. 25, 1778, when the Cherokees attacked the fort. The Indians didn't capture Fort Nail, John B.'s application says, but they did steal a number of horses, including "the first and only horse which this declarant then owned." Ten weeks later, Cherokees attacked Fort Nail again, this time capturing a nephew of John B. named Claiborne Bellamy.
John B. said he later fought in the Battle of Kettle Creek in Wilkes County on Feb. 14, 1779, as well as performed service in South Carolina. In August 1779 he was discharged with no reasonable chance of getting back to Georgia, so he reports he spent his time "staying as a Georgia refugee, sometime in Virginia and sometimes in North Carolina until the first day of May 1781 when, having been called for by Col. Elijah Clark, he the declarant started from Burke County in the state of North Carolina where he then was to come to the second siege of Augusta. But he was on the day and year last aforesaid shortly after starting thrown from his horse and arm and collarbone broken and his shoulder smashed by which misfortune he was entirely disabled from the performance of any more or further service whatsoever." Thus, in the summer of 1781, he went home. He was probably around 21 years old.
Baptists and Babies
We next hear from John B. sometime after October 1788, when the Rev. Dozier Thornton established Dove's Creek Baptist Church about four miles west of Elberton, the county seat. Among the church's members were John B. Webb, numerous other people with the Webb name, and Martin and Joseph Deadwyler. By 1801, tax digest records suggest the area was thick with Webbs--including a John Webb (possibly John B.'s father, but we can't be sure) who had two slaves and 100 acres of land. The region was nearly equally populated with Deadwylers.
On Oct. 18, 1806, Elbert County records register Burrell Webb as having married Sarah Booth. (One family history recorded before World War I lists the wife as Susan Ann Boothe.) They had 10 children: Fortunatus, Walton Polk, John B. Jr., Paine, Gaines, Washington, Patsy, Elsie, Barbara Angeline, and Elizabeth. Of these, Walton is without question our direct ancestor.
Walton Polk (also known by the family as Pope) Webb was born around 1808 or 1809. On Nov. 13, 1837, he married a fellow teenager named Susannah Deadwyler, a fellow parishioner at Dove's Creek and probably the daughter of Martin Deadwyler. Such unions were quite common in those days; at least a half dozen Webbs and Deadwylers married each other in Elbert County in the 1820s. There were so many Webbs in the area that one community was known as the Webbsboro District.
Walton and Susannah settled in the area, probably farming land that belonged to Susannah's father. They remained members of Dove's Creek Baptist Church, showing up on rosters in 1829 and 1846. There's no word regarding whether they were good farmers, but they certainly weren't any slouches at producing children; over the years they had about 15 of them. I say "about"because names, numbers and birth dates differ markedly depending on who did the recording. My research suggests their names and birth dates are:
- John M. Webb (born 1828)
- Jane M. Webb (1829)
- Jeptha Webb (1830)
- Rebecca Ann Webb (1833)
- Fortunatus Pope Webb (Feb. 16, 1834)
- Joseph H. Webb (1836)
- Philip Elkana Webb (Dec. 25, 1837)
- Barbara Angelina Webb (1840)
- William M. Webb (1841)
- Luther P. Webb (1843)
- Lucinda E. Webb (March 4, 1845)
- Alexander Webb (August 1846)
- Lucy Victoria Webb (July 22, 1848)
- Benjamin Franklin Webb (sometime between 1850 and 1852)
- Americus Stephens Webb (Jan. 21, 1856
Early Days in America (Virginia, pre-1780)
Webbs have lived in America since at least the 1660s. This isn't surprising, given that Webb is a common name in England and that their West Country and Suffolk homelands provided plenty of early emigrants to the New World. As would be expected, these Webbs tended to go to the two main English colonies: Virginia and Massachusetts. There are references to Webbs in Massachusetts as early as the 1620s, and one distant relative of ours has speculated that we're descended from a Webb born in the Virginia colony in the 1620s--less than a generation after the Jamestown colony arrived in 1607. One early arrival to Virginia colony was a William Webb, who in 1668 obtained 400 acres in Westmoreland County and who during the subsequent decades sold land to George Washington's grandfather.
The first Webb of whom we're reasonably certain to have descended from is John Webb. According to a man in Georgia named Jack Webb who has spent the most time searching our part of the family tree, John was born between 1705 and 1715 in Virginia. He married a Peggy Claiborne around 1730 in Albemarle County, which today is limited to the area around Charlottesville but in those days took in pretty much everything west of Richmond. They had two children named Lucy and Susannah "Sukey" Webb, at which time Peggy died sometime before 1735.
Around the 1750s, John got married again, this time to Peggy's sister Lucy Claiborne. They produced eight children, among them John Burrell Webb, who was born April 24, 1761, in Albemarle County, Va. He is most likely our ancestor.
The first Webb of whom we're reasonably certain to have descended from is John Webb. According to a man in Georgia named Jack Webb who has spent the most time searching our part of the family tree, John was born between 1705 and 1715 in Virginia. He married a Peggy Claiborne around 1730 in Albemarle County, which today is limited to the area around Charlottesville but in those days took in pretty much everything west of Richmond. They had two children named Lucy and Susannah "Sukey" Webb, at which time Peggy died sometime before 1735.
Around the 1750s, John got married again, this time to Peggy's sister Lucy Claiborne. They produced eight children, among them John Burrell Webb, who was born April 24, 1761, in Albemarle County, Va. He is most likely our ancestor.
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