Family Roots in North Georgia
The family homestead.
Aunt Lenore. Union sympathizer. The black sheep of the family. We don’t talk much about her. A real turncoat. They say she ratted out the entire Confederate force on Blood Mountain. They say she even smoked cigarettes. An obvious floozie and a hussy. Look at those legs. Shameless. No wonder the South lost with women like her running around.
Colonel Horst C. Graham. Renegade.
The Winter of ’63
Little Becky Wrathall. I get chills up and down my spine whenever I see this picture. One can only imagine what she went through in the winter of 1863. That was after the battle of Chickamauga, one of the bloodiest battles ever fought on US soil. Young Becky was a runaway. She ran away from that harridan, Lenore.
You see, Becky’s mother and brother had died the year before in an ambush on Slaughter pass. They were returning home from getting provisions chiefly in the form of salt and money from Governor Brown. The war had left people in desperate straits. The governor was helping families in order to keep the men from deserting and returning home. Anyway, they were attacked by lowlife Confederate deserters hiding in the mountains. Rather than give up what little they had, they fought them hard. Most of the degenerate thugs died at the end of Mrs. Wrathall’s shotgun, but in the end, Becky’s kin succumbed to the horrible beatings inflicted by these reprobate cowards.
Aunt Lenore, Becky’s mother’s sister, came to live on her sister’s farm. This selfish, reckless woman didn’t have the slightest idea how to raise a child. And thus the seeds were sown for the tragedy that would eventually befall young Becky Wrathall.
The mountains of North Georgia were tough slogging at the best of times. During the winter of ’63 things were downright deadly. Drought had set in. Men in uniform walked north for miles past towns and fields raising the dust as they passed. It hung in the air for days on end making it difficult to breathe. The story will be continued at a later date.
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