How Green Was Their Valley

      The first of my Widener ancestors to settle in Georgia came from Fairfield County, South Carolina, in the 1820s. My great-great-great-great-grandfather Henry Widener was born in 1791 or 1792 and married Nancy Kuglar in 1814. There were two daughters by the time the family migrated, probably along the Fall Line Road from Columbia to Augusta and across the Savannah River into Georgia. It was another 130 miles through piney woods to their destination, Henry County, where they established themselves as farmers near the Ocmulgee River’s headwaters.

      The lands they settled were former Creek Indian territory ceded to Georgia in the Treaty of Indian Springs on January 8, 1821.  In the resulting bonanza neither the Wideners nor Nancy’s younger brother James David Kuglar, who migrated with them, won lots. Perhaps they purchased land from the grantees or became tenant farmers. (James won a tract of land in Muscogee County in the 1827 lottery but it appears he remained in Henry and was married there a year later.) 

      Nancy gave birth to three sons beginning with my great-great-great-grandfather John D. Widener on June 22, 1830. Joseph M. and Andrew J. followed around 1832 and 1833. There was also a daughter, Mary Ann, born around 1835. From the 1850 census we learn the value of Henry’s real estate was $3,830 and that he was unable to read or write. It seems however that his wife was literate. The three sons married in Henry County in that decade; John was the first, wedding Nancy Amanda ‘Mandy’ Dickey on December 28, 1854. Nancy was the daughter of a quite elderly Irishman (he was 61 when she was born on October 26, 1835) named Thomas and a Virginian named Martha, 20 years his junior. They too moved to the county in the 1820s from South Carolina and were of modest means: in 1850 and 1860 Thomas valued his property at $200.

Blackjack Mountain: the green, green grass of home

      In the late 1850s the Widener and Kuglar clan lit out for the territory of Carroll County, what’s been called Georgia’s last frontier. They settled in the furthest reaches of its southwestern corner, nestled against the Alabama line, in Bowdon. The town is situated among the undulating ridges and expansive vistas of the Southern Appalachians. Blackjack Mountain, one of the highest points in Georgia south of Atlanta, stands just south of town and was the sight of trade routes and rituals before the Cherokee were expelled in the 1830s. Bowdon was founded in 1856 and would have counted the Wideners and Kuglars as pioneer citizens. The families homesteaded on neighboring lots in the fledgling hamlet, offspring were produced, the land was cultivated, and there was reason for optimism until the crisis of secession exploded into civil war and sent the Widener brothers to battles far away.

The church sits on a promontory overlooking the Little Tallapoosa River in the Victory community east of Bowdon. Some Wideners are reputedly ensepulchred in the churchyard, but on my visit I encountered neither their granite memorials nor ghostly whispers.