Catoosa County's rich history touches upon many of the defining events and social changes of America's past. As settlers expanded westward, Georgia forcibly removed Native Americans from the boundaries of what would eventually form Catoosa, a Cherokee name that the settlers adopted as their own. As the site of the second most costly battle in the Civil War, Chickamauga set the stage for much that followed in Catoosa's history, from the end of a three-thousand-year-old mode of warfare to the beginnings of women's service in the military. Though nearly one million people visit Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park each year seeking to understand and connect to the Civil War struggle, many remain unaware of the larger part Catoosa played in the unfolding drama of America. Join local historian Jeff O'Bryant as he brings this valuable heritage to light.

In 1878, Elder Joseph Standing traveled into the Appalachian mountains of North Georgia, seeking converts for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Sixteen months later, he was dead, murdered by a group of twelve men. The church refused to bury the missionary in Georgia soil; instead, he was laid to rest in Salt Lake City beneath a monument that declared, "There is no law in Georgia for the Mormons." Most accounts of this event have linked Standing's murder to the virulent nineteenth-century anti-Mormonism that also took the life of prophet Joseph Smith and to an enduring southern tradition of extralegal violence. In these writings, the stories of the men who took Standing's life are largely ignored, and they are treated as significant only as vigilantes who escaped justice. Historian Mary Ella Engel adopts a different approach, arguing that the mob violence against Standing was a local event, best understood at the local level. Her examination of Standing's murder carefully situates it in the disquiet created by missionaries' successes in the North Georgia community. As Georgia converts typically abandoned the state for Mormon colonies in the West, a disquiet situated within a wider narrative of post-Reconstruction Mormon outmigration to colonies in the West. In this rich context, the murder reveals the complex social relationships that linked North Georgians--families, kin, neighbors, and coreligionists--and illuminates how mob violence attempted to resolve the psychological dissonance and gender anxieties created by Mormon missionaries. In laying bare the bonds linking Georgia converts to the mob, Engel reveals Standing's murder as more than simply mountain lawlessness or religious persecution. Rather, the murder responds to the challenges posed by the separation of converts from their loved ones, especially the separation of women and their dependents from heads of households.

Few places in the United States feel the impact of courthouse disasters like the state of Georgia. Over its history, 75 of the state's counties have suffered 109 events resulting in the loss or severe damage of their courthouse or court offices. This book documents those destructive events, including the date, time, circumstance, and impact on records. Each county narrative is supported by historical accounts from witnesses, newspapers, and legal documents. Maps show the geographic extent of major courthouse fires. Record losses are described in general terms, helping researchers understand which events are most likely to affect their work.

There are many books of many kinds and this volume properly classified would probably belong to the "sui generis," "sic trasit gloria mundi" variety. If the reader has grown a little rusty on classic Latin I do not mind saying to him further that the latter phrase has been sometimes translated, "My glorious old aunt has been sick ever since Monday," but I do not think that this revised version has been generally accepted as strictly orthodox. This book cannot be said to have been written without rhyme or reason for its pages hold more rhyme than poetry and three reasons at least, have conspired to give it literary existence. A hundred years and more from now it may be that some far descendant of the author, while fingering the musty shelves of some old library, may find some modest satisfaction in the thought that his ancient sire had "writ" a book.