This view shows Coffee County on the left and Telfair County on the right.
This afternoon, I had the pleasure of attending a talk about the fiction of Brainard Cheney at the Glennville Public Library. During the 1980s, Stephen Whigham recognized the importance of Cheney’s works set around the Altamaha, Ocmulgee, and Ohoopee Rivers during the late 19th century and has now brought them back into print after decades of obscurity. Lightwood, River Rogue, This is Adam, and Devil’s Elbow recall the lore of the river and the river people long gone from the landscape.
Brainard Cheney was born in Fitzgerald in 1900 and moved to Lumber City by the time he was six years old. Upon the death of his father at age eight, he and his sisters were raised by their mother. He attended the Citadel during his teen years and later, at Vanderbilt was a student of John Crowe Ransom and a roommate of Robert Penn Warren. Ransom and Penn Warren were the best-known members of the Fugitives. From 1925-1942 he worked for the Nashville Banner. (Other contemporaries were Andrew Nelson Lytle, Caroline Gordon, and Allen Tate). He and his wife Frances, herself the author of a widely-used textbook of library science, converted to Catholicism in the 1950s and became close friends of Flannery O’Connor’s. From 1952-1958, Cheney was public relations director for Tennessee Governor Frank Clement. He died in 1990 at the age of 89.
If you’re interested in the history of these rivers or the folklife of the region, I think you’d enjoy these reprints, and Stephen Whigham’s accompanying work, The Lightwood Chronicles: Being the True Story of Brainard Cheney’s Novel Lightwood. I really can’t say enough good things about how lucky we are to have renewed access to these works and the dedication of someone who believes in the literature of his region. It’s not just fiction, it’s the culture of a people nearly as gone as the Creek and the Cherokee…
Beautiful! Makes me want to grab a canoe and head out.
THANK YOU for sharing the information on Brainard Cheney — I had never heard of him that I know of. Read everything you posted, as well as the link just now. I studied Flannery O’Connor in college and really enjoyed her work. Can’t wait to read Mr. Cheney’s books.
The Ocmulgee River is a beautiful stream. It covers much of Georgia and its history. The culture of its people is compelling and interesting. For a time, it was the boundary between the United States and the Muscogee speaking Creeks. After the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama, that all changed. The area south of the river was for many decades thinly settled by pioneers. The names Indigenous people attached to the area tell the connection between the two worlds. The name “Okmulgee” is of course native American. The river once ran deep and not so wide. It was clear and pristine. Today with logging and other manmade interventions, it is heavily silted and often shallow. No steamboat captain would venture upon her waters. Yet, she remains a jewel, a place that all Georgians should treasure. There exist a 1911 Army Corp of Engineers map of the river that depicts many early landings and river sites. Place names like Dodge’s Old Boom Eddy, Mosquito Bight Bluff, Burkett’s Ferry, Half Moon Bluff as well, as Town Bluff on the Altamaha, appear on these maps. Sites of some steamboat wrecks are identified. During the steamboat era, it was common for boiler explosions to happen. In March of 1860, one such event happened downstream from Jacksonville. The Steamer S.M. Manning out of Hawkinsville, steaming up stream met a horrible end. Its boiler exploded and about thirteen citizens of Telfair County perished. Some were “prominent” citizens and others were slaves. The steamer was returning from Savannah with a load of dry goods and other cargo needed in the upcountry. Captain Taylor’s two sons were aboard. One was blown on to the shore and survived and another died. The event happened at Lawrence and Martha Manning’s lower Fence. Lawrence Manning married Martha Ashley, an early Telfair pioneer. Newpapers of the day covered the accident. The unfortunate son was buried in the Ashley Family Cemetery. When a young college student my brother-in-law, Jack Dorsey, and I relocated the abandoned cemetery. There we found his grave which told the facts of the tragic story. The cemetery housed several Manning and Ashley family members and several unmarked slave graves. The earliest marked grave was an Ashley family female dated 1814, if my memory serves me well. Today the cemetery is in Jeff Davis County. At the time of the explosion, it was Coffee County. Until 1854, it was a part of Telfair County on the south side of the Ocmulgee. As a child the greatest pleasure I had was rambling the fields and streams of the Snipesville-Denton community which included the Ocmulgee River and her old oxbows. My dad loved to fish the “old River” an oxbow near Rocky Hammock and the Jeff Davis-Coffee County line. Her Blue Gills, Red Breast, Warmouth, and Catfish made mighty fine meals upon the Bookhardt table. Old Man River he don’t say nothing, he just keeps on rolling…. or something like that. Jesse M. Bookhardt, son of South Georgia and the Ocmulgee-Altamaha River culture.