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."
Saturday, July 31, 2010
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.
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