Garnett Andrews was a jurist, writer, politician, and Know-Nothing candidate for governor, and the father of diarist Eliza Frances Andrews. He was born on October 30, 1798, to Ann Goode and John Andrews on the family plantation near Washington, Georgia, in Wilkes County. Andrews was one of sixteen children and, according to family records, the only child to live past middle age. Early Life Andrews’s father was a Revolutionary War (1775-83) soldier who served with the Continental Army that accepted the surrender of Lord Cornwallis’s British forces at Yorktown, Virginia.

The appointment of James Wright in 1760 as governor of Georgia coincided with a period of expansion. By 1764 the boundaries of the colony had expanded to include those territories between the Mississippi and Chattahoochee rivers that had not been granted to the Florida colonies. Map by John Nelson. Reprinted by permission of William J. Morton 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.

The Georgia Historical Commission was the earliest statewide force for historic preservation in Georgia; the advent of the commission was the first time state government, rather than a private organization, became involved in historic preservation. Much of the work accomplished during its relatively brief existence—including the erection of hundreds of historical markers—survives today. The commission was created by the Georgia legislature in February 1951 to promote and increase knowledge and understanding of the history of the state.

In 1932 the radical journalist John Spivak published Georgia Nigger, a thinly fictionalized condemnation of Georgia’s penal system that unveiled the harsh working conditions and brutal treatment suffered by African Americans in the state’s convict camps. Walter White, the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), described Spivak’s novel as “the most devastating expose of the treatment of Negroes in the Georgia chaingang that has ever been written.

The German Lutheran Church in Augusta, pictured in 1895, was one of the many Lutheran churches to spring up around the state during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 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. Requests for permission to publish or reproduce the resource should be submitted to the Georgia Archives.