This Day in Georgia Civil War History
March 06, 1865
Diary Entry on Large Pond, Refusal to Go with Drunk
Eliza Frances Andrews again gave some interesting insight into how the land could change quickly. She also refused to go rowing with a man who had been drunk and rocked the boat last time they were together.
“After breakfast, we all piled into a big plantation wagon and went to see Prairie Pond, a great sheet of water covering over 200 acres. It has formed there since Col. Maxwell bought the Gopher Hill plantation. He says that when he first came here there was not a patch of standing water as big as his hand on all the acres now covered by Prairie Pond, and the great skeletons of dead forest trees still standing in the outer edges of the lake show that the encroachment of the water is still going on. Some years after he came to Gopher Hill, he says, a blue spring on the other side of the plantation, that formed the outlet of an underground stream, became choked up from some cause, so the waters had no escape, and Prairie Pond began to form and has been slowly increasing ever since. Near the lake we came to two remarkable lime sinks. They are both very deep, and as round as drinking cups. One of them is covered with a green scum about an inch thick, composed of scaly plants, like lichens. Underneath this scum the water is clear as crystal. The stones all around are full of fossil shells, and we found some beautiful crystallized limestone that sparkled like diamonds. We had to leave our wagon several hundred yards from the border of the pond and make our explorations on foot, for want of a wagon road. In returning we took the wrong direction and went a mile or two out of our way, getting very wet feet, and I tore my dress so that I looked like a ragamuffin into the bargain. When at last we reached home, the servants told us that Mr. and Mrs. Warren, with Gen. Graves, Mr. Baldwin, and Clint Spenser and Joe Godfrey from Albany, had come over to dinner, and not finding anybody at home, had set out in search of us. We girls scurried to our rooms and had just made ourselves respectable when Mr. Baldwin and Mr. Spenser, having tired of their wild-goose chase, came back to the house. Mecca and I got into the double buggy with them and started out to hunt up the rest of the party. After dinner, we went to Coney Lake again. I went in the buggy with Joe Godfrey. He and Mr. Baldwin each invited me to take a row. I didn’t go with Mr. Baldwin. ” Source: Eliza Frances Andrews, The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1908), pp. 108-110.
