Rad laughed. "Let's go on to the carriage, Allison. Sounds as if you're just as anxious to get back to the Meadors as I am."
He reached out to take his sleeping son from Rebecca as Allison called to Morrow, "Come along, darling. Your father says it's time to go home."
Allison returned to Bluegrass Meadors where she had found a second love. But each July, as the heat bleached the earth and the breezes stopped singing through the apple trees, Allison left the redbrick mansion with its white Doric columns and went down to the creek to be alone by the old willow tree.
And on that same day, in other small towns and villages along the rail lines from Nashville to the gates west, the survivors of the train called "Sorrow" remembered July 5, 1864, and dreamed of going home.
In Roswell, the mills were rebuilt and the town bound up its grievous wounds. Rose Mallow became a showplace, while the old shack where Madrigal O'Laney was born finally fell down of its own accord.
Today, historians continue to search for some trace of the four hundred and fifty Roswell women who were uprooted by that long-ago war.
Their memory still haunts the land.
§
Author's Note
The small town of Roswell, situated on the banks of the Chattahoochee River twenty miles north of Atlanta, contains some of the most beautiful antebellum homes in Georgia. Founded by Roswell King, a wealthy businessman from Darien and Savannah, it was originally a summer colony, an escape from the malarial fever of the great coastal plantations. The town archives contain the history of many families who settled there, including the James Bullochs, whose daughter, Mittie, married Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., and became the mother of a U.S. president. Her wedding at Bulloch Hall was the social event of the 1853 season.
But The Roswell Women is not based upon this wealthy upper class. Rather, it is based on the mystery of what happened to four hundred and fifty women and children—workers in the King textile mills—at the time of the Civil War.
When General Kenner Garrard, who served under General William Sherman, arrived in Roswell in July 1864, prior to the siege of Atlanta, he found three Confederate mills in operation—one, a woolen mill with a French flag flying overhead, and two cotton mills—in full production. He was ordered by Sherman to burn the mills, arrest the workers for treason, give them nine days' food rations, and ship them north across the Ohio River.
The Roswell Women is a fictionalized version of what might have happened. It traces this actual trail of tears from Marietta to Nashville, Tennessee, to Louisville, Kentucky, and into Indiana.
The disappearance of the Roswell women is cloaked in mystery. Old military diaries with conflicting stories, orders written by General Sherman in the field, newspaper reports filed by Northern correspondents, an accounting discrepancy in the number of women arriving in Nashville from Marietta, and advertisements sanctioned by a provost marshal, offering them as bond servants, are only bits of a puzzle waiting for completion. The women's voices are still silent, for history has turned up no personal accounts written by the women themselves.
It is my hope that by telling this fictionalized story of one little-known event of 1864, I have made readers aware of a continuing tragedy throughout history—of countless numbers of women and children caught in the corridors of war.
Frances Patton Statham
About the Author
FRANCES PATTON STATHAM is an award-winning artist, musician, writer, and lecturer. She received her undergraduate degree magna cum laude in music from Winthrop University, a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Georgia, and an honorary doctorate from World University.
Listed in such biographical works as International Authors and Writers Who's Who, World Who's Who of Women, and Personalities of the South, Statham resides in metro-Atlanta, Georgia.
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