By: F.A. Battle & Company, Pub. 1880, Reprinted 2016, 880 pages, Hard Cover, Index, ISBN #0-89308-040-3. This volume is prehaps the RAREST of all books of biographical sketches of persons located within Georgia and Florida. It is so rare taht are only 6 original copies known to exist in the Public Libraries of Georgia. This book contains 1,000 biographical histories of individuals living in 1889. Tht means that these genealogies will carry the reader back several generations going as far back as the mid 1700's. Due to the vastness of this book, we do not have enough space here to mention the surnames of families or individuals that are covered within. But it should be considered a State wide reference book for both states. This book should be a welcome addition to the Library of anyone who is researching in Georgia & Florida.

This examination of cultural change challenges the conventional view of the Georgia Pine Belt as an unchanging economic backwater. Its postbellum economy evolves from self-sufficiency to being largely dependent upon cotton. Before the Civil War, the Piney Woods easily supported a population of mostly yeomen farmers and livestock herders. After the war, a variety of external forces, spearheaded by Reconstruction-era New South boosters, invaded the region, permanently altering the social, political, and economic landscape in an attempt to create a South with a diversified economy. The first stage in the transformation -- railroad construction and a revival of steamboating -- led to the second stage: sawmilling and turpentining. The harvest of forest products during the 1870s and 1880s created new economic opportunities but left the area dependent upon a single industry that brought deforestation and the decline of the open-range system within a generation.

Wild and wooly recollections from the Florida frontier Cracker Times and Pioneer Lives brings together the reminiscences of two pioneers who came of age in antebellum Florida's Columbia County and the nearby Suwannee River Valley. Though they held markedly different positions in society, they shared the adventure, thrill, hardship, and tragedy that characterized Florida's pioneer era. With sensitivity, poignancy, and humor, George Gillett Keen and Sarah Pamela Williams record anecdotes and memories that touch upon important themes of frontier life and reveal the remarkable diversity of Florida's settlers. Keen's story typifies that of many "Cracker" families. Born in Georgia, he moved with his parents to the Florida Territory in 1830 in search of a better life. He grew up in a dangerous yet exciting setting, and as an old man at the turn of the twentieth century recorded his colorful memories with a verve and vernacular reminiscent of the Georgia humorist, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet. Keen writes about subsistence farming, cattle grazing, the Seminole wars, marriage customs, medical practices, politics, the abundance of wildlife, and the paucity of educational opportunities. Admittedly not a Cracker, Sarah Pamela Williams was the daughter of a nationally recognized man of letters. In 1847 she moved to Columbia County's seat of Alligator (Lake City) and later married into one of northeast Florida's prominent planter families. She recorder her recollections of a life brightened by social functions, travel, and cultural endeavors. Offering a rare glimpse into Florida's Civil War homefront, Williams tells of making clothes of homespun, tithing crops to the Confederacy, fearing hostilities just thirteen miles from her home, and surviving as a widow in the lean postwar era. Cracker Times and Pioneer Lives features biographical sketches of more than 280 persons mentioned by Keen and Williams in their writings, many of whom subsequently pioneered settlement in the Florida peninsula.

A tale of ordinary Florida citizens who, during extraordinary times, were called to battle against their fellow countrymen Over the past twenty years, historians have worked diligently to explore Florida’s role in the Civil War. Works describing the state’s women and its wartime economy have contributed to this effort, yet until recently the story of Florida’s soldiers in the Confederate armies has been little studied. This volume explores the story of schoolmates going to war and of families left behind, of a people fighting to maintain a society built on slavery and of a state torn by political and regional strife. Florida in 1860 was very much divided between radical democrats and conservatives. Before the war the state’s inhabitants engaged in bitter political rivalries, and Sheppard argues that prior to secession Florida citizens maintained regional loyalties rather than considering themselves “Floridians.” He shows that service in Confederate armies helped to ease tensions between various political factions and worked to reduce the state’s regional divisions. Sheppard also addresses the practices of prisoner parole and exchange, unit consolidation and its effects on morale and unit identity, politics within the Army of Tennessee, and conscription and desertion in the Southern armies. These issues come together to demonstrate the connection between the front lines and the home front.

The first full-length biography of a saloon-brawling braggart and frontier opportunist turned justice of the peace Henry Theodore Titus (1822-1881) was the quintessential adventurer, soldier of fortune, and small-time entrepreneur, a man for whom any frontier—geographical, cultural, social—was an opportunity for advancement. Although born in Trenton, New Jersey, and raised in New York and Pennsylvania, Titus bore no allegiance to his native soil or the Yankee values of his ancestors. In the 1850s he became a staunch defender of southern slavery, United States expansionism into the Caribbean Basin, and ultimately the Confederacy's war of disunion. In Colonel Henry Theodore Titus, the first full-length biography of Titus, Antonio Rafael de la Cova reveals a man whose life and adventures offer glimpses into nineteenth-century America not often examined; these indicate the extent to which personal and collective violence, racial prejudice, and moral ambiguities shaped the country at the time. Belligerent, intemperate, egomaniacal, and of imposing stature, Titus was the bête noire of the abolitionist press. Despite his northern roots, he became a caricature of the southern braggart and frontier opportunist. National newspapers followed his reckless exploits during most of his adult life. Titus fought brawls in the saloons of luxury hotels and narrowly escaped the hangman's noose as a Border Ruffian leader in Bleeding Kansas, a Nicaraguan firing squad as a filibuster, and death in a Comanche ambush in Texas. He nearly prompted an international incident between the United States and Great Britain when he was arrested in Nicaragua for threatening to shoot a British naval officer and disparaging the queen of England. The colonel was jailed in New York City for disorderly conduct and trying "to organize the desperate classes for a riot." During his lifetime Titus held more than a dozen occupations, including sawmill owner, postal inspector, soldier of fortune, grocer, planing mill salesman, farmer, slave overseer, turtler, bartender, land speculator, and hotel keeper. He pursued silver mining in the Gadsden Purchase portion of the Arizona Territory where his brother was killed and their hacienda destroyed by Apaches. Despite his violent character and his pro-Confederate values, Titus was politically savvy. He did not take up arms during the Civil War. After a brief stint as assistant quartermaster in the Florida militia, he returned to civilian life and sold foodstuffs and slave labor to the Confederacy. Florida Reconstruction governors later appointed him as notary public and justice of the peace. Rheumatism and gout kept Titus bound to a wheelchair during the last few years of his life when he became an avid civic leader. His greatest legacy was ironically his most benign. Borrowing today's equivalent income value sum of half a million dollars, he established a grocery store and a sawmill in a hardscrabble Florida frontier settlement that became the city of Titusville, the county seat of Brevard County and tourist gateway to Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center.