Leon Neel was a leading advocate of the ecological management of forests. Trained by famed Georgia naturalist and land manager Herbert L. Stoddard, Neel refined the Stoddard-Neel System of forest management over the course of fifty years. Neel’s implementation of this system allowed many plantations in both the Red Hills area, between Thomasville and Tallahassee, Florida, and the Albany region to be noted for their rare ecological values. Neel was born on March 20, 1927, in Thomas County.

Lowell Mason, known as the "Father of School Music" influenced the development of urban sacred music, as well as music education, in antebellum Georgia. A native of Massachusetts, Mason led the "better music movement," which favored the works of European classical composers, in his adopted home of Savannah. From What We Hear in Music, by A. S. Faulkner The New Georgia Encyclopedia does not hold the copyright for this media resource and can neither grant nor deny permission to republish or reproduce the image online or in print.

Mildred Lewis Rutherford served as teacher and principal of the Lucy Cobb Institute in Athens for twenty-two years. The students, known as "Lucies," encountered a more academically serious curriculum than was found at the stereotypical finishing school. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South. View on source site The New Georgia Encyclopedia does not hold the copyright for this media resource and can neither grant nor deny permission to republish or reproduce the image online or in print.

Mary Hood, a two-time winner of the Townsend Prize for Fiction, is acknowledged as one of the finest writers of fiction today. Her stories, which appear in numerous anthologies and textbooks, are set in her native Georgia, a terrain she knows from the southeastern coast to the northern Blue Ridge Mountains. Early Life and Education Mary Hood was born on September 16, 1946, in Brunswick to Mary Adella Katherine Rogers, a Latin teacher and native of Cherokee County, and William Charles Hood, an aircraft worker who hailed from New York City.

The McDuffie County Courthouse, located in Thomson, was built in 1872. Major renovations to the courthouse, the county's first, were made in 1934 and 1970. Courtesy of Don Bowman The New Georgia Encyclopedia does not hold the copyright for this media resource and can neither grant nor deny permission to republish or reproduce the image online or in print. All requests for permission to publish or reproduce the resource must be submitted to the rights holder.