The area of the Mulberry River watershed settled by Maher Shalal Hashbaz Lyle and his
family is still mostly rural, its bucolic appearance interrupted occasionally
by gothic scenes of idle bulldozers at the gates of failed residential
developments and rusted cars in the lots of kudzu-covered body shops, relics of
when the region was, according to prosecutor Floyd G. Hoard, “the hub of the
stolen automobile industry in rural Georgia.” State Route 53, carrying cars between Braselton and Winder, crosses the
Mulberry River, now the boundary between Barrow and Jackson Counties, around
the site of the early Lyle settlement. The
terrain rises into piney woods above the river, wherefrom one’s northward gaze
surveys the rolling timberline of the Appalachian foothills. By the time of
Maher’s 1814 interment in the hilltop graveyard that bears his name his family
had put down roots in Jackson County that would keep them there for
generations.
Jackson County in 1796
A person who lives in an isolated house
As the Lyle
patriarch drew his last breaths the country for whose independence he fought
was imperiled again by its former imperial master. In the War of 1812 the
British armed the natives to menace the frontier, endangering the settlers in
Jackson County and other areas along America’s contested western border.
Georgia’s authorities acted against the threat and ordered the construction of
a fort on Hog Mountain near the headwaters of the Appalachee River in
present-day northeastern Gwinnett County. The outpost was completed in 1813 and
named Fort Daniel. A route which we now call Peachtree Road was cut through to
Fort Peachtree, another hastily-built stockade 30 miles southwest on the
Chattahoochee River. Fort Daniel stood about fifteen miles west of the Lyle
home and was garrisoned by the 25th Regiment of the Georgia militia,
which counted among its number Maher’s sons John and William Crawford. In the
event the Brits’ native adjutants did not strike Jackson County.
Jackson
is phenomenally rich in bottom lands. The county is a system of water
courses. The head waters of the Oconee string through the county in
perfect network. There are the Pond Fork, Allen Fork, Walnut Fork and
Mulberry Forks of the Middle Oconee River. Then the trail of creeks,
Sandy, Big and Little Curry, Crooked Creek, Cabin Creek, Turkey, Candler, Pond
and Hurricane Creeks form the North Oconee, and these two branches of the river
drain the lands for 10 miles and join just below Athens.
—1886 Jackson County Edition of The Weekly Banner-Watchman, Athens, Georgia
William was born on December 21,
1770, in Virginia and married Elizabeth Boring, born on October 29, 1784, in
North Carolina, on March 25, 1803, in Jackson County. Proximity may explain
their matrimony: Elizabeth’s parents, Isaac Boring, Sr. and Phebe Browning,
lived east of the Lyles along the Mulberry River. William was a farmer whose
strict piety forbade labor on the Sabbath. The 1850 census discloses the value
of William’s real estate was $2,500; in 1860 it was $4,000, and his personal
estate was assessed at $10,804. The 1860 agricultural census shows his farm
produced fifteen bushels of sweet potatoes, 75 pounds of butter, 35 bushels of
wheat, 250 bushels of Indian corn, and 8,000 bales of hay. In the autumn of
that year William died, two months shy of his 90th birthday;
Elizabeth passed on September 17, 1863. The Battle of Chickamauga raged 150
miles to the northwest as her family was in mourning. William and Elizabeth had
twelve children, born between 1804 and 1827. The firstborn was Dilmus Johnston,
named for William’s brother Dilmus. This uncommon name comes from Catalonia, a
region of eastern Spain, and means “a person who lives in an isolated house.”
Dilmus Sr. inspired several successive generations of Lyles and associated
families to use his name, yet it is surprising that William chose it because
family lore recounts that they didn’t even get along. Dilmus Sr.’s métier as a
purveyor of spirits may have had provoked his ire.
When the English
arrive they build a house, when the Germans arrive they build a barn, and when
the Scots-Irish come they build a distillery.
—Appalachian
saying
Dilmus Sr. lived along the Mulberry
River where in addition to operating grist and saw mills he ran a whiskey
distillery whose product was so admired by the locals they begged him not to
leave for the War of 1812 and thus deprive them his home brew. When the war
ended in 1815 and the British blockade was lifted, Dilmus Sr. ordered from Nova
Scotia two pairs of flint millstones, which arrived at Charleston harbor and were
transported overland to the Mulberry River with great difficulty. Dilmus Sr.
used the millstones for the next 32 years until in a macabre instance of peripeteia one of the
massive granitic discs fell onto his foot and crushed it. Naïve to lethal
infection and far removed from any competent practitioner of medicine, his
family took him home, where he succumbed to gangrene on November 1, 1847.
Mulberry train depot, ca. 1910
Dilmus Sr.’s son Dilmus Reid
was born on December 3, 1815 in Jackson County and operated the mill after his
father’s demise. In early 1861 he served as one of three delegates representing
the county of his birth at the secession convention in Milledgeville, where he voted
in favor of Georgia’s departure from the Union. He had been the postmaster at
Mulberry since April 4, 1838, and at the South’s defeat was dismissed from the
position and denied a presidential pardon due to his service under the
Confederate government. This prompted Dilmus Reid to appeal to President Andrew
Johnson in a letter dated July 26, 1865, the text of which reads:
Sir: I held under the Government of the Confederate States
the appointment of Post Master at Mulberry Jackson County Geo – a small country
Post Office remote from any City – or Town. This office I held for the
convenience of the surrounding community & certainly not for the honor or
profit of the position. But the fact of having held it excludes me from the
pardon & amnesty offered in you excellency’s Proclamation of May 29th 1865.
I therefore, herewith humbly and respectfully submit to your Excellency my
Special application for Pardon from the pains and penalties now imposed upon me
by the Laws of the United States. I have taken and Subscribed the prescribed
Amnesty Oath, which I shall observe and keep in good faith. My property is
worth less than twenty thousand. Being above the Conscription age I have had no
connexion with the Military Service in the Confederate Armies except a few months
service in the State Militia under a Law of the State. It is my intention &
purpose to be a loyal and useful citizen for the U.S. From that Government I
expect protection and to that Government I give my Allegiance. I am Somewhat
advanced in life with a large family mainly to raise and educate. With these
responsibilities and duties resting upon me I cannot feel indifferent to the
loss of what means I possess. The thought of living under the ban of the
Government is deeply mortifying to me. I therefore appeal to your Excellency
for the exercise of that clemency towards me, which has so signally
characterized the official conduct of your Excellency towards so many others
and invoke pardon from all the penalties to which I am now obnoxious. No
proceedings have been instituted to confiscate my estate. All of which I have
the honor most Respectfully to Submit As in duty bound &c &c
Dilmus Reid affirmed his support for the Constitution and
the emancipation of the slaves in a loyalty oath signed in Athens on August,
14, 1865, witnessed by Major Matthias S. Euen, who filled in the blanks on the
printed form: “The above named has florid complexion grey hair,
and blue eyes; is 5 feet 9 inches high, aged 49
years; by profession a merchant.” The provisional governor of Georgia
recommended a pardon, citing his position as “only a Country postmaster,” and
passed on the application to the United States Attorney General. Mail to the
Mulberry office was discontinued on September 28, 1866, but when it was
reestablished in 1872 he was restored to his former position, which he held
until his death in 1889.
This remarkable photograph is on display at the Crawford W. Long Museum
in downtown Jefferson. It portrays three of William Crawford Lyle's
sons; one of them is believed to be Dilmus Johnston Lyle.
Miles of Lyles
William and
Elizabeth’s oldest son Dilmus Johnston Lyle was born on January 4, 1804, in
Jackson County. On February 21, 1828, he married Sarah Polly Green, born on
February 15, 1801, in Spartanburg, South Carolina to John Green and Jane
Bickerstaff. His wife, known to her family as Sally, gave birth to eight
children between 1829 and 1842. Dilmus seems to have been a farmer of limited
means. The 1860 census gives the value of his personal estate as $560, in 1870
as $100; in none of the censuses does he claim to own any land. Dilmus is
listed in the 1880 census, conducted on June 10, as the head of household with
Sally and two of their children. It is believed he died later that year as no
further records can be found. Sally died on November 21, 1893. Her obituary reads:
Sarah Jane
Lyle was the second child born to Dilmus Johnston and Sally, on November 8,
1830. She can be found living with her parents in the Mulberry settlement in
the censuses of 1840, 1850, and 1860. On December 9, 1860, she married William
Henry Potter, a carpenter born in Rhode Island. Nothing is known of his parents
or when he came to Georgia, except that he was previously married to Permelia
Nixon on August 10, 1825, with whom he had eight children before her death in January
1860. According to the 1850 census he was born around 1795, yet the 1870 census
lists his birth year as 1810. It is possible he lied about his age to Sarah
Jane and her family, as he was about 35 years older than her and even older
than her father. In the 1860s they had two daughters and two sons, the youngest
of whom was trusted with the old family name Dilmus. In 1870 William listed the
value of his land as $300 and his personal estate as $200. There is no further
record of him, and the time and nature of his death and his place of burial are
unknown.
Sarah Jane at Doster Cemetery: “She died as she lived a Christian”
Sarah Jane was just entering middle
age when her husband died. According to subsequent censuses she was occupied as
a farmer and was the head of household in which some of her children and
grandchildren lived and worked as farm laborers. In 1910 Sarah Jane’s newborn
great-grandson and my future great-grandfather Edgar Lee Tate lived with his
family not far from her home west of Jefferson. They were farmers in an area
known for corn, oats, hay, peas, and syrup, and the harvests were so plentiful
and the climate so inviting that Jackson County’s population reached 30,000
that year—a sum not surpassed until 1990. The wild frontier Maher Shalal
Hashbaz Lyle settled had changed in a century to a landscape of fields, pastures,
mills, and railroads—a transformation witnessed and helped along by the Lyles
and finally bookended by Sarah Jane Lyle Potter’s death on June 17, 1913, for which her grandson and my great-great-grandfather Alvin Crawford Tate penned this tribute:
The Jackson Herald, July 3, 1913
