Summer Reading at Woodlands: A Juvenile Library of the Old South

In 1850 a Savannah planter and lawyer, George Jones Kollock, finished building his Victorian-gothic summer house, Woodlands, near Clarkesville in northern Georgia. At that time he possessed a library for himself and was in the process of acquiring another for his six children, ranging in age from one to fourteen: Mary, the youngest; Susan; William; John; George, Jr.; and Augusta. Most of the 1,242 volumes that he already owned were inherited from his father, Lemuel Kollock, M.D. Most of the children's books were purchased by George Kollock or were given as gifts to members of the family through the 1840s and 1850s.

Previous scholars have discussed the reading habits and library holdings of the Southern planter aristocracy.¹ Yet the recreational and instructive reading of the children of this class has not, as far as I am aware, been discussed or listed at any length. Before considering the library Kollock accumulated for his children, it is worthwhile to give a biographical sketch of the planter and his family. It is my belief that Kollock was in every way a typical Southerner of his time and that both his adult and his children's libraries therefore tell us something important about the reading habits of antebellum Southerners and their children.

George Kollock kept a diary from 1850 to 1894, the year of his death. As this diary and his letters show, he conformed to the patterns of behavior typical of the successful planter-businessman in the Old South. In addition, he managed his investments during the Civil War shrewdly enough to emerge as a relatively solvent citizen of the defeated South. A year after finishing his summer house upcountry, George Kollock built the Chapel of the Holy Cross and a schoolhouse on Woodlands property. Until the Civil War he employed a Frenchwoman as a teacher. And when they were old enough to go away, John and George, Jr. were sent North to college, as were the sons of other planters. With the outbreak of the War, John and George, Jr. returned home to fight.

Woodlands, near Clarkesville in northern Georgia. Photograph by Jan Bakker.

Kollock supported the Southern cause patriotically, joining the Home Guard and burning his fields of coastal cotton in 1861. Even after his initial enthusiasm gave way to doubt and prayers, he remained staunchly loyal to his side in the War. He fled Savannah after having taken "a shot at the Yankees" from the battery on the Ogeechee River, as he wrote in his diary entry for December 11, 1864. On January I, 1865, he recorded an expectedly patriotic wish: "May it please God to smile upon our cause; and bring it to a successful end this year—and raise the drooping spirits of our people."

When the end of the War came, George Kollock dutifully took the "Yankee Oath" and in his entry for September 13, 1865, expressed appropriate resentment of it: "Bah!—Worse than an emetic." Then he got back to work, forward-looking, solid, determined, no doubt regretful, but not paralyzed by the loss of his antebellum world. Indeed, during his years as a loyal Confederate, Kollock had prepared for postwar times by speculating financially. His salt industry reaped wartime profits, and the income he earned from renting out a Savannah wharf for five years, 1864-69, helped his family to weather the first years of the lean postbellum period.

After the War, he continued to do business in town and to collect the rent for his wharf, increased because of the reopening of Savannah harbor. His ladies took boarders in the family house in Savannah. Returning to Woodlands unhurt, his sons began farming and sheep-raising. On the coast, George Kollock continued to work his plantations with those ex-slaves who returned and stayed for wages, as he wrote in the year 1866. In 1868 he placed his upcountry farmlands in the care of a farmer. The family moved to Woodlands permanently in 1873. The children's books upstairs were left to be...