Part of the GAGenWeb Project.
JOSIAH SIRMANS, JUDGE BEN SMITH'S ANCESTOR, RESTS IN FENDER CEMETERY
File contributed by Robert Latimer Hurst.
Many Of The Smiths, Paffords Are Buried In This Historic
Cemetery Just Outside Lakeland
CAROLINE PAFFORD MILLER'S GRANDFATHER, ROWAN PAFFORD, IS INTERRED IN SPRINGHEAD CEMETERY
This Pioneer Rests In The Burial Ground Of The Church He Built
By Robert Latimer Hurst
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Judge Ben Smith's and Carolina Pafford Miller Ray's exchange of letters gives an insight into several topics: the background found in the writing of the 1934 Pulitzer Prize novel, "Lamb in His Bosom," in 1933 and incidents in Southeast Georgia history. Both serve the student of history and literature well. In 1990, when this correspondence was being sent from Waycross, Georgia, to Waynesville, North Carolina, Mrs. Ray admitted to being unwell. "After another, wearing, horrible stay in (the) hospital, I'm still around. Hospitals are torture centers!" she exclaims. She, then, pauses in her narrative to thank Judge Smith for a copy of his book, "Chuck's Crew," which relates experiences during Ben's active service in World War II. "I didn't know you are a `wri-tah,' too. May the Lord be with you! (You'll need Him!)" Ben thanks her for the autographed copy of "Lamb" and offers her a "newsy letter" about South Georgia "where your roots are." He tells that he has returned to Mud Creek in Clinch County. The magistrate, who was born in Lakeland in 1923, reflects on the log houses, rail fences, syrup boilers, smoke houses --"In fact, every farm was a self-sufficient unit. Spending the night at my aunt's, you could see the stars through the roof but not a drop of rain would come in. I know that you must spend a lot of time thinking about your early days. ..." The novelist's attention quickly turns to early 1990s world news: "As to Bush (the current President's father)!! What can I say? If we're going around invading everybody ("Bum, Bum, Bum. Here I come...)in little Grenada, Panama and, now, Kuwait, I suggest that we fight the monsters who hold up food for starving millions in Africa. "Those Saudi Arabic sands... I can hear our boys coughing from here. `Thus do the glaring sands make conquerors of us all...,'" she continues. Again, the subject changes as she confides to Ben that he's "prettier than Joe Namath --my other favorite `Joe,' the only person who ever really loved Marilyn Monroe (for whom I felt a deep compassion.) Poor little girl Blue Lost --Joe DiMaggio truly loved her...." The judge writes about his early remembrances: "My forebears came to Clinch County (then Ware) in 1822. The first was Josiah Sirmans, who was the first white settler in these parts. He is ancestor to almost everyone in Clinch and Lanier counties. In 1825, Lawrence Smith came from the Barnwell District, South Carolina. He was my great-great grandfather and settled on the northern perimeter of the Okefenokee Swamp. He was neighbor to the Wildes family, who were massacred by Indians. His own barn and outbuildings and crops were destroyed by the Indians during the Seminole Wars of 1837 -1839. He forted up his home soon after, and it became a place of refuge for fleeing settlers. "He and his oldest son, John (my great-grandfather), were both members of Capt. D.J. Miller's company of Ware County Militia. It is noted that a James Pafford was also on the roster. This surely has to be a progenitor of your family as they were in this country by then, having come from Tennessee. This was at a time when the son, James Marion, was only five years old, so it could not have been he. This militia unit was a member of General Floyd's expedition that drove the Seminoles out of their swamp paradise. (I am not particularly proud of this.) Remembering South Georgia, Caroline asks Ben if he "knows" St. Simons Island: "My very favorite spot on Earth! Many the time was that I `crabbed' off that ol' pier! How dear to my heart... Ol' Man Time sleeps nights on `the Island' and often naps in the day time while nothing ever happens." She refers to Paul Redfern, whose historic airplane flight in the 1920s began from St. Simons. Certainly, those days found much happening on this barrier isle, and Caroline Pafford was a part of those "Roaring `20s." Ben, hoping that his letter cheers up the former Waycross native, points out more ancestry that relates to her family as well as his. "Lawrence Smith's son, James C., was the first settler to start an overland freight business. He hauled supplies from the coast to the interior by oxcart and became a wealthy man for those times." He has touched upon a point of interest because Mrs. Ray wrote how her pioneer characters traveled in oxcarts and went from the interior to the coast once a year for supplies. "It is noted that one of the Pafford sons, Berrien, married my kinfolk, Harty, granddaughter of Josiah Sirmans. Her brother, Isaac Sirmans, married my great-aunt, Nancy Richardson. He was the grandfather of the late Hamp Sirmans who ran the Lincoln-Mercury dealership in Waycross. "Your ancestor, Rowan Pafford, was a private in Company K, 26th Georgia Infantry, which was my own grandfather's company. Upon the reorganization in 1862, he became a lst lieutenant in the 4th Georgia Cavalry (Clinch County) and in 1864 took office as Senator in the Georgia Senate during the Confederacy," declares Judge Smith, who continues to cite the closeness of the two families. "I simply do not understand people who are incurious about their heritage. Ours is so wonderful, such a rich tapestry of the human struggle and triumph over the most desperate hardships. I was first privileged to view this great thing in your own book as a little boy, and I never got over the experience. It was an honest book and the only one that came close to telling the story of our people," finishes Judge Smith. Her thoughts turn to the "Ol' Satilla." Informing that she was born on a bluff just above the Satilla where great grapevines (`Fox grapes'?) teased all chidren, the author adds that the joy of any piney woods youngster was pulling down young pines and "riding the great, green horses." "It's all gone," she concludes. "It's all gone --but engraved forever on our true hearts of `solid gold.' There were huckleberry and gall-berry bushes and ... barefoot, brown as coffee beans, happy as whip-poor-wills and mourning doves... But it's all gone now." |
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