Death of a Confederate

Afterword

We do not know what Arthur replied to Robert Stephens, nor do wt know what our Uncle Arthur knew about his Uncle William's life or his death. Of his other ancestors we never heard mention. We regard Arthur as one of the kindest, most generous gentlemen we have ever known, but he was also somewhat reticent, and we never knew enough of his family's history to frame the questions that we would dearly love to ask today. The story that has been told in this book layhidden in the letters and papers that were only recently found scattered throughout the Smith house. Like Robert G. Stephens, we recall with some nostalgia our visits to Roswell. Along with our other two brothers, Thomas Fry and William Wirt Skinner, we experienced during our childhood a family ritual of Sunday afternoon drives to the Smith house, where our great-aunt Mary Norvell Smith and uncle Arthur Smith lived during the warmer months of the year. 268 Afterword The pilgrimage route from our home in Decatur, Georgia, to Roswell was a long, winding, two-lane blacktop road through country then largely untouched by developers. As children we played in the yard on those Sunday afternoons, pretending to ride the cast iron lions that still guard the end of the walkway to the back door of the Smith house while our parents visited with Arthur and Mary. Our reward for patiently enduring our staywas inevitably a six-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola, which Aunt Mary would cheerfully offer us, always wrapped in a paper napkin. We then would sit on the front porch in the big white Brumby rocking chairs while we smelled the aroma of the boxwood that grew all around; sometimes we would sit in the library, which wasfilledwith many musty and worn leather-bound volumes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On occasion we had a southern fried chicken dinner with homemade biscuits in the dining room prepared by Mary and Arthur's devoted housekeeper, Mamie Cotton. But we were never allowed in the parlor of the Smith house, nor permitted to venture upstairs, and never did we set foot in the attic. When Arthur William Smith died in 1960, the lineage of Archibald Smith reached its end. Our parents, James Lister Skinner Jr. and Josephine Fry Skinner, inherited the Smith house from our great-aunt Mary Norvell Smith when she passed away in 1981. In an effort to fulfill our father's promise to Arthur Smith to "take care of his ancestral home" and to preserve this historic home for future generations, our parents arranged the transfer of the Smith house to the city of Roswell. Following our mother's death in 1986, it was determined that an inventory should be made of all the papers and documents in the house, and only then did the story of the Archibald Smith family's hardships and bereavement during the Civil Warbegin to unfold slowly before us. All of the letters to William Smith up to the time of November 5,1864, were found in the attic apparently undisturbed, still tied in neat bundles at the bottom of the trunk that he had sent to Valdosta before Sherman arrived at Savannah. Other letters in this volume were found among the dozens of other trunks, boxes, and portable writing desks in the attic, stuck here and there between the pages of books, lying loose in drawers, or tucked awayin wardrobes. Also recovered from among the Archibald Smith papers during this time was the bulk of the manuscript autobiography of Henry Merrell, along with many of the supporting documents, letters, and the drawings he made depicting life in early Roswell. This remarkablememoir,edited by Dr.James L. Skinner III, was published in 1991 by the Universityof Georgia Press as The Autobiography of Henry Merrell: Industrial Missionary to the South. Afterword 269 The Burial of Latane by William D. Washington. Engraving after a painting by William D. Washington. Eleanor S. Brockenbrough Library. The Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia Today the Archibald Smith House, now called the Archibald Smith Plantation Home, is open to the public and serves as a teaching museum for local schools about life in nineteenth-century Georgia. On the grounds near the old corn crib still stands a three-hundred-year-old oak tree, the second oldest oak in the state of Georgia. From the base of the...