For generations, Georgia’s northwest mountains had been home to the Floyd clan. They were suited to the land. Every one of them was a die-hard Georgia Cracker.
Centuries before, the same countryside where the Floyds raised crops and hunted wild game had been the dwelling place for the Etowah Indians—prehistoric Mound Builders who wore shell ornaments, carried long flint swords, and buried their nobility in elaborate costumes made of feathers and wild cotton. Europeans first visited the area in 1540 when Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto and his company of iron-suited soldiers prowled the forests and mountains in their quest for gold. Almost two hundred years later, in the early 1730s, Gen. James Oglethorpe came to Georgia, named for England’s George II, and established settlements for debtors and religiously oppressed Englishmen. There, he found a loose confederation of Cherokee Indians, living more or less at peace with neighboring Creeks and Chickasaws. Poorest of the New World colonies, Georgia soon became a haven for the persecuted and the downtrodden, and acted as a military and geographic buffer between the thriving Carolinas and Spanish Florida.
Following the American Revolution, more white settlers poured into Georgia from the Carolinas and neighboring states. They established towns and cultivated the land. With the invention of the cotton gin and because of newfound profits reaped by the harvest of King Cotton, the state began to prosper. While Georgia’s coastal seaport cities, especially Savannah, grew larger in the early 1800s, however, northern and western Georgia remained home to large tribes of Indians and was sparsely populated by whites. The Cherokees were one of the primary tribes. Like law-abiding whites, they built cabins and lived as farmers or raised cattle and ran trading posts. Some of these Indians owned black slaves and used them to work their fields. The Cherokees founded their capital at New Echota in northwest Georgia, lived as a true independent nation governed by their own constitution and code of laws, published their own newspapers, and taught their children an alphabet developed by Sequoyah, the half-breed Indian scholar.
Northwestern Georgia, the ancestral home of the Cherokees, offered a climate cooler than elsewhere in the state, given its mountains and river valleys covered with pine and oak woodlands. It appeared to be an ideal place to raise children and crops. Among the branches of the Floyd family who settled in the Georgia mountains were those who moved there from the more settled lands in eastern Georgia and South Carolina in the late 1820s. Some of these settlers were latter-day Hernando de Sotos, nineteenth-century explorers in search of gold. At the same time, others fled the coast and moved into the Georgia highlands to escape yellow fever and other diseases that flourished near the ocean.
Included in this vanguard of newcomers was Patience Floyd, born in 1796 in South Carolina to Tennessee parents. Patience was a determined woman, not afraid of man or beast. She was also Charley Floyd’s great-great-grandmother.
Widowed, with a pair of sons to raise, Patience, whose name came from the Latin word pati, meaning “to suffer,” toiled day and night in order to carve out a living from the untamed land. Her sons—Walter Floyd, born in South Carolina in 1822, and Redding Floyd, born in Georgia in 1828—learned how to handle plow, ax, and muzzle-loader rifle when they were still small boys. Although she could not read or write, Patience saw to it that her sons got some schooling, learned their letters and how to cipher. She nourished her family on wild game and corn cakes prepared in an iron skillet over an open fire. There was always plenty of fresh milk, eggs, and vegetables. Her children grew sturdy and tall. They liked their new home.
As law-abiding as Patience was, she raised her boys in an area of Georgia that had long served as a sanctuary for the lawless. During this period, an organized gang of cutthroats and thieves, who called themselves the Pony Club, operated throughout the region. This pack of killers preyed upon frontier settlers and travelers who used the old Federal Road, a trail that ran through the Cherokee country. Fur trappers, farmers going to market, hog and cattle drovers, and unsuspecting pioneers, such as the widow Floyd, were forced to journey back and forth on this crude highway that served as the white newcomer’s initiation into the territory. One preacher called the north Georgia countryside along the highway “the darkest and most dangerous place in the old Cherokee Nation.” Because of the criminal element that thrived there, the state of Georgia passed legislation that required all settlers on Indian lands to take an oath of allegiance obliging them to obey the laws and uphold the state constitution. Patience gave her promise to walk the straight and narrow, but she and her boys also kept loaded muskets at the ready just in case a mountain brigand came calling.
In 1830, Patience Floyd resided in Hall County. The following year, William Lumpkin, Georgia’s newly elected governor, a man who had an eye on white expansion and regarded all Indians as a handicap to the state’s progress, ordered Indian territory surveyed. Land west of the Chattahoochee River and north of the Carroll County line, including parts of Hall, Carroll, and several other counties, were combined to create the large county of Cherokee. Each of the ten counties in the Cherokee purchase was surveyed and divided into four sections. Some areas were designed as forty-acre “gold lots,” because it was believed there were rich gold deposits in the soil, but most of the area was measured off into large 160-acre “land lots” for farming.
Later the county was subdivided into ten smaller counties, including Floyd County, named after noted Indian fighter and statesman John Buchanan Floyd. A Virginia native who was educated in South Carolina, Floyd failed at both law and cotton farming in Arkansas before returning to Virginia, where he became governor. Years later, he became an outspoken supporter of states’ rights and helped secure the election of James Buchanan as President. For his effort, Floyd was appointed Secretary of War, but he resigned in 1860 and within a short time became a Confederate brigadier general during the War Between the States.
In 1880, more than a half century after she first moved into northwest Georgia, Patience Floyd—by then an old woman surrounded by her grandchildren and memories—contended that she was kin to Gen. John B. Floyd. In the 1830s, however, Patience and her boys were too busy farming and worrying about Pony Club riders to care about relatives with highfalutin pedigrees. During this earlier period of her life, land in the newly formed counties was distributed through a lottery system, open to Georgians who met certain guidelines. Caucasian adult males were at the top of the preferred list. Other persons qualified to draw lots included white widows and orphans under eighteen years of age. Patience Floyd and her boys vied for a parcel of property to call their own, as did thousands of other newcomers.
Before this allotment could occur, the whites had to rid the land of the Indians. The Cherokee Nation—an Indian government patterned after that of the United States—faced imminent destruction. It was increasingly clear that the Native Americans were in the way of the white settlers. Finally, in 1832, when the land lottery was held and after many treaties were drafted and broken, the Cherokee Nation was effectively abolished. President Andrew Jackson’s Indian-removal policy took hold, with a warped vision of “progress” that preceded Manifest Destiny by many years. Then, in 1835, a small faction of Cherokees signed yet another treaty, one that ceded the Cherokee lands in Georgia to the United States. However, when the document was presented to the tribal council, the Cherokee leaders declared it illegal. By year’s end, the same faction of Cherokees met at New Echota, the Cherokee capital situated at the confluence of the Coosewattee and Conesauga rivers, and signed still another treaty with the federal government. This time, they ceded all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi River to the United States. In return, the federal government promised to pay the Indians $5 million and grant them 7 million acres of land in the West. Although most tribal leaders and their followers again rejected this document, the government held them to the terms of the treaty and gave them two years to vacate their lands in Georgia.
There was resistance, but the whites prevailed. Betrayed by a combination of government officials, missionaries, and a few of their own unscrupulous people, the Cherokees were rounded up and placed in stockades. Some were evicted at musket point from their homes. During 1838 and 1839, all Indians were expelled from the area and forced to march under the supervision of Gen. Winfield Scott and his seven thousand mounted soldiers along the notorious Trail of Tears to the lands provided west of Arkansas that became known as Indian Territory.
Indian removal was a brutal process, more than a mere dislocation of land, but a policy intentionally designed to inflict degradation and shame. War Department regulations stipulated that no one, except the infirm or infants, could ride in a wagon or on horseback during the twelve-hundred-mile trek from Georgia across the mid-South. Thousands of disenfranchised Indians died of exposure, cholera, hunger, and heartbreak on their long walk west. One Georgia volunteer, who went on to serve as an officer in the Confederate army, said, “I fought in the Civil War and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by the thousand but the Cherokee Removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.” Some Cherokees hid in the mountains of North Carolina, and members of other southeastern tribes managed to elude the white soldiers, but most of the Cherokees, along with Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles were placed in the distant Indian Territory, where they eventually became known as the Five Civilized Tribes.
With the Indians removed, white settlers such as the Floyds continued to spread throughout Georgia. By the decade of the 1840s, Patience Floyd and her sons had moved to Carroll County, named for another signer of the Declaration of Independence. Strapping men in their twenties, the Floyd brothers by this time had taken wives, and before 1850, they had moved with their growing families once again. They went farther north to Cass County, named for Lewis Cass, a native of New Hampshire who was Secretary of War in 1831, a candidate for the presidency in 1849, and a senator from Michigan. The land in Cass County was known to be some of the most desirable in the entire Cherokee section. In the late 1840s, this land sold for thirty dollars per acre and produced anywhere from twenty-five to fifty bushels of corn to the acre.
The Floyds quickly cleared off the sassafras, persimmon, papaw, and witch hazel in order to plant such crops as corn, wheat, cotton, rye, barley, and oats. They turned to the thick Appalachian forests and built stout log homes. Water was abundant from the many springs and streams. The Etowah, Oostanaula, Coosewattee, and Conesauga rivers wound through the county’s valleys and were fed by many clear creeks, including the Raccoon, Pettis, Euharlee, Pine Log, Two Run, Oothcaloga, and Stamp.
The widest and most fertile of all the valleys were formed by the Etowah River, flowing in a crooked course like a big bow from the eastern side of the county southwestward across the southern part, then turning northwestward into neighboring Floyd County. Frontiersmen on horseback or in wagons drawn by yokes of oxen came out of the hills to barter tobacco for other supplies in the towns scattered throughout the county. New towns sprouted like spring cotton. There was Cassville, Allatoona, Cartersville, Free Bridge, Iron Works, Kingston, Little Prairie, Cold Run, and Wolf Pen. In some of these burgs, such as Cartersville, not only farmers but professional men settled—judges, doctors, teachers, and even a marshal whose main duties were to collect taxes, supervise grave diggers and volunteer firemen, ring the city bell hourly each night from 10:00 P.M. until 4:00 A.M., and deal with the rabid dogs and wild boars that wandered into town.
The Floyd brothers built their homes near Adairsville, a settlement on the Western & Atlantic Railroad located exactly halfway between Atlanta and Chattanooga. Five miles to the north of Adairsville lay a Cherokee village called Oothcaloga—the Cherokee word for beaver. The name was from the stream that ran through the valley known as the “garden spot of the Cherokee country” by the pioneers who settled there. At one time, Oothcaloga had been home to the Adair family, descendants of Scottish adventurers who had settled among the Cherokees, married into the tribe, and, by the time the Cherokee lands were taken by the government, become prominent representatives of the Indians. After the Cherokees left, the town of Adairsville was created and given its name to compliment the Scotch-Cherokee chiefs who had been friendly to the whites. Stores, churches, and schools were built, and in 1854, Adairsville was incorporated. By then, the Floyds had become fixtures in the community.
Walter, Patience’s firstborn son, and his wife, Charlotte, had three children—fraternal twins named May and James, born in 1842, and a second boy, Harry, born in 1848. In her old age, Patience Floyd, always the epitome of a pioneer farm woman, lived with Walter and his family. Her youngest son, Redding, and his wife, Catherine, born in 1825 in South Carolina, settled nearby with their eight children: Clark, 1853; Frances (Fanny), 1855; Charles Murphy, 1857; Theresa (Treasy), 1860; their own set of twins, Jefferson and Martha, 1863; Nancy, 1866; and finally, Franklin, 1869.
During the decade of the 1850s, Cass County witnessed a period of great growth and improvement. Cotton was steadily replacing corn as the dominant crop, and had already become the largest cash crop in dollar value. Corn and wheat mills were built near Adairsville, and during this last decade of peace before the Civil War, more than a half dozen iron furnaces went into operation, turning out thousands of tons of pig iron each year. Like cotton, slaves still fetched good prices. By 1860, the county reached the height of its antebellum prosperity. Palatial mansions, belonging to the wealthy planters, appeared grandly around the region, log cabins for the more ordinary folk were remodeled, and schools were constructed.
Nonetheless, discontent and violence appeared like dark clouds on the horizon. War was imminent. One of the saddest chapters in the nation’s history was about to unfold. Georgia and the rest of the South would never be the same. Neither would the Floyds.