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.