Coming Up in This Spring...
On May 25th, I will be in Warrenton speaking at the annual banquet of the Warren County Historical Society. Again, I'll be speaking on the crash of the cotton economy in the 1920s, something that was especially hard felt by towns like Warrenton.
New Magazine Article
"A Vast Pool of Oil" was discovered in east central Georgia in 1919. This discovery was destined to make millionaires out of cotton farmers and bankers alike, or in fact any one fortunate enough to purchase a few shares. All you needed to do was plunk down $35--payable on time if necessary. There were no doubt some millionaires created, just not among the investors....
Look forward to reading about the Middle Georgia Oil & Gas Company in the Autumn issue of Georgia Backroads magazine. It's a great story about a great scam.
New Book Update
My new book, tentatively titled A Killing on Ring Jaw Bluff: The Great Recession and the Death of Small Town Georgia, will be published early in 2013, according to Mercer University Press. I had hoped to have it available sooner, but it takes a while for these things.
I believe the wait will be worthwhile. The book is a both a work of history--detailing the crash of the cotton economy in rural
Georgia in the early 1920s--and a bit of biography of the life of Charles Graves Rawlings, my great uncle. Charlie was a larger-than-life figure who became very wealthy during the Golden Age of Georgia's small towns, only to spend his final years in prison convicted of the murder of his first cousin. If the topic sounds a shade boring, it's not! Read it and you will learn a lot (as I have) about how and why the rural South changed in the 1920s, about the Ku Klux Klan, about the Great Oil Discovery that didn't exist, about arson and murder and bought juries, and many other similar dark secrets that make life interesting.
The book tracks the rise of Charlie Rawlings from his younger days as a livery stable owner to his peak as bank president, railroad president, owner of tens of thousands of acres of land, planter, husband, father and philanderer to his later years serving a life sentence for the murder, a crime he likely didn't commit.
A New Suspense Novel
For the last year and a half I have been diligently working on the Ring Jaw Bluff book. It was a chore, to say the least, as non-fiction is far more demanding than fiction. In the latter, you simply create your world and the characters that people it. In the former, you must discover the truth and be quite accurate about it. I had started on another "Southern suspense" novel set in Savannah, but had put it to one side to devote my energies to finishing the non-fiction book. Now that that's done, I'm back working on the novel.
This work, which I tentative title "The Girl With Kaleidoscope Eyes," introduces a new character, John Wesley O'Toole. He's a defrocked (or is disbarred?) attorney who has been released from prison following a charge of vehicular homicide and is struggling to rebuild his shattered life. As the end of his parole draws near, he is approached by a wealthy man who wants O'Toole to help him locate his missing eighteen year-old granddaughter. Soon, the girl is discovered dead, and O'Toole realizes someone is trying to set him up for a murder he didn't commit. The book has a complex plot with many twists and turns set in the background of Savannah. I think my fans will really like it. (And don't worry, Matt Rutherford may return one day, but he needed a rest!)
New Travel Photos Posted
2011 was a busy year for travel. I have collected a small sample of some of the scenes I snapped in Greece, Paris and Guatmala. Plus a whole album of the Doors of Antigua. (Not a band, in case you were thinking that....) Click on one of the links to connect.
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