About a mile from the historic cemetery and the old Wrightsborough Methodist Church, on a cool, clear day last November, I watched horses leap a fence and trot into a field. Horses gathered in a circle, glistening in the noonday sun and helmeted riders sported red and black jackets. Hounds milled around a kneeling Epp Wilson, wagging their rigid tails. Father Frank prayed for the soul of James Wilson, then blessed the hounds, the horses and the foxes.
I walked across the driveway and climbed on to a wagon. A silver-haired lady wearing blue jeans offered me a red drink named for a notorious Queen of England as our trailer pulled into a long train of other wagons and through a shady pecan orchard. We rolled to a stop in a golden pasture where skilled horsemen and horsewomen raced after hounds. Then, early in the afternoon, we stopped at the edge of a woodland. I climbed from the trailer and walked down a steep hill, past a sign that said, Rock Dam. Our driver told me that, just last year, the men and women of the Belle Meade Hunt had rebuilt the dam. But he wasn't sure who originally built the dam, or when.
So, back home, I called Dot Jones, historian and leader of the Wrightsborough Foundation. On an April afternoon, she took me back to the dam. She told me that this was Joseph Maddock's dam. And that it is nearly 250 years old. It once belonged to the Quaker leader of the new community of Wrightsborough. Water from a spring rain rushed over the crest of the dam and fell in a white spray into the pool below.
"Over there was the mill," said Dot, pointing across the creek.
I sat on a log beside the moving water, my eyes fixed on the trees where she pointed. And I thought I saw William Bartram, the botanist, explorer and artist from Philadelphia who traveled the length and breadth of the new American southeast between 1773 and 1776. Bartram brought me to Wrightsborough, and I think a lot about him. I have followed his path throughout the southland, looking at the land he described and trying to understand the changes that have taken place in the 225 years since he described it.
He rode up here from Augusta while he waited for the Cherokees and Creeks to arrive for a major conference. He knew this place where I was sitting; knew this dam and stream. "Mills are erected on the swift flowing Streams" of Wrightsborough, he wrote to Dr. Fothergill in England. And he knew it when the black oak trees here measured up to eleven feet in diameter at the five-foot level. He came here, I think, to be with his fellow Quakers, as well as to explore the forests and their plants and animals.
I let my mind work back through the centuries. Bartram dismounted. He shook hands with the farmers who stood, with their horses, at the door of the mill. For them, horses were for plowing and dragging and riding across the state and nation. They chatted about farms and fruit trees. They may have talked about the unrest that was brewing back in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Men of peace talk about war ... and peace.
I had read Bartram's words about the people who moved here from North Carolina thirty years before he came:
The Town is already laid out. & about 20 houses built; several Traders in it & Goods are sold as cheap here as at Augusta, Sugar, Rum, Salt. & dry Goods &c... .
The soil is very fruitfull, hills & Vales, watered and beautified by numbers of salubrious waters ... playing over gravelly Beds, through shadowy Vales; murmering in the hollow rocks.
They plant Wheat, Barley Flax, Hemp, Oates, corn, Cotton, Indigo, Breed Cattle, sheep, & Make Very good Butter & Cheese. Fruit Trees thrive very well here, Apples, Pears, Peaches, Plumbs, Nectarans, Cherries, Rasberries.
Across the creek, with the eye of my imagination, I watched water rush through the mill race and splash onto the wheel. White sheets of spray in the springtime air. And the wheel turned. Slowly, constantly, the wheel turned. Inside the mill, stones ground corn. Whump, whump, whump. Gears turning stones, meal pouring into coarse sacks. And the wheel continued to turn.
I looked again at the dam. Granite boulders, dark, brown and black, shining under a coat of water. I recalled the Rock House, just a few miles to the south. Built of the same granite I saw in the dam.
And my mind took me to the yard outside the Rock House. It was 14 years after Bartram's visit. The Quakers were now gone from Wrightsborough. They disagreed with the revolutionaries and they refused to fight in the Revolution. No longer welcome, they moved to Tennessee and Ohio.
Eight young Indian men were unloading deerskins from the backs of their horses. They had ridden miles from the new frontier to sell their skins to Thomas Ansley. Their faces were scowling, angry.
Over by the well, a group of white men gathered. Their clothes were shabby, their language rough and violent. "Virginians," said my host. "And Carolinians." One was missing an eye. Mr. Ansley told me the man had lost his eye in a fight.
"They get drunk and fight at the least provocation," he said. "Often, they gouge an eye from their enemy."
I shuddered and followed three teen-aged boys who carried loads of deerskins down into the protection of the thick rock walls of the cellar. The aroma of dried apples and smoked hams pleased my nostrils.ÊÊ A bin of potatoes and heavy crocks of honey and sacks of corn meal stood on the dusty floor. And in a corner, muskets and gun powder.
I thought, "This is more than a house. It is a fortress, built to guard the people and their goods from the violence of the Georgia backcountry. Indian attacks and white marauders."
Walk back with me to the Rock Dam on Maddock Creek. Watch with me as the water turns a wheel to grind corn into meal. See the wheel turning. Slowly, steadily. And think of these United States. The men who built that mill stood on the Georgia frontier...the very edge of European civilization. The outer limits. Aliens, they were. Newcomers in a rich and fertile land.
Here, as far out as a white person could settle, legally, they saw the birth of a new nation.
At that moment in the American saga, white men planted fruit trees and wheat and corn in fields farmed, not too many years before, by men, women and children with red skins. The Indians had moved farther west. They would never return. At least not to hunt and farm and bring their children into the green world.
The wheel turned again, and some of the farmers faced redcoats and won their freedom. The Quakers moved away.
And the wheel turned. Others farmed these fields and reared their children along these creeks. Cotton grew in the fields. A thousand black hands picked it and the white men prospered.
And the wheel turned again. Steel rails were laid through Thomson. Wrightsborough lost her importance. Silence returned to the land, and trees began to grow again on the hills.
And now?Ê The wheel turns once more. Yellow and green machines rove the forests, belching grey clouds of diesel exhaust. They buzz through a hundred trees in a day and pile the branches in rows. And the tree farmers replace the luxuriant, graceful oaks with slender pines. And fox hunters gather and ride the fertile fields. And golfers swat a ball down green pastures. An 83 year-old, black woman sits on the porch of her house at the edge of the field where she and her husband once planted cotton. She=s waiting for her son, who lives in Decatur, to come to take her to the doctor. And a nursery grows plants that the botanist from Philadelphia never saw here. And lovers of blues gather in a field each spring. And boys play Little League ball. And families move into new houses.
The mill is gone. Only a skilled archaeologist could trace its walls and rooms. But the wheel still turns.
And you and I stand on the edge of our frontier. (There is always a frontier.) We bring our sacks of corn - our choices, our wisdom, our values - we bring them to the turning wheel to be ground into tomorrow.
