A Woman's Wartime Journal: A Woman's Wartime Journal: An Account of the Passage over a Georgia Plantation of Sherman's Army on the March to the Sea ... of Dolly Sumner Lunt (Mrs. Thomas Burge)

Though Southern rural life has necessarily changed since the Civil War I doubt that there is in the entire South a place where it has changed less than on the Burge Plantation near Covington Georgia. And I do not know in the whole country a place that I should rather see again in springtime - the Georgia springtime when the air is like a tonic vapor distilled from the earth from pine trees tulip trees balm-of-Gilead trees (or bam trees as the negroes call them) blossoming Judas trees Georgia crab-apple dogwood pink and white peach blossom wistaria sweet-shrub dog violets pansy violets Cherokee roses wild honeysuckle azalia and the evanescent green of new treetops all carried in solution in the sunlight. It is indicative of the fidelity of the plantation to its old traditions that though more than threescore springs have come and gone since Sherman and his army crossed the red cottonfields surrounding the plantation house and though the Burge family name died out many years ago with Mrs. Thomas Burge a portion of whose wartime journal makes up the body of this book the place continues to be known by her name and her husbands as it was when they resided there before the Civil War. Some of the negroes mentioned in the journal still live in cabins on the plantation and almost all the younger generation are the children or grandchildren of Mrs. Burges former slaves.