Elbert County, Georgia

Yesterday after driving from Illinois to Henderson County, Kentucky to do research on our elusive Arthur Fowler family, we decided to make a lightning trip to Georgia to see if we can find out more about the Fowler's in Georgia. Today we visited the Elberton county public library, and searched their genealogy "corner", which was the best the county had to offer record wise. After overhearing lots of lovely conversations within this little public library, like "I didn't bring ID. Will my prison card do?", we headed out to see if we could figure out where the Fowler's and Hawthorn's land might be.

All of the land records talked about the 'North Fork of the Beaverdam River' and the 'Deep Creek waters', so we bought a map (note to the current generation - that is an actual representation of the topography, ie what a land looks like, printed on paper. Check wikipedia if you don't know what paper is) and started combing the internet at our local McDonalds (love their free wifi!). And lo and behold, on uglybridges.com (I'm not kidding you) they talked about a bridge over the north fork of the Beaverdam River.  Here are some pictures of our adventures:

Here is the ugly bridge. Hard to tell, huh.

Jon went searching in the woods and found an old "wagon trail" deep into the trees. Chris figured that's where the bootleggers are hanging out, and refused to go too far in. Jon still insists that this is actually a Fowler family wagon trail.

Under the trees you can see this muddy creek meandering along.

This is what it looks like from up on the bridge, looking up and down river.

So we drove up the road just a little, and pulled over to explore some more. Jon is insisting this is a historical Fowler gate and address sign.

We figure these were bridge columns from long ago. I'm sure the Fowler's were awesome bridge builders, too.

This creek is moving along much faster. Probably why they needed a bridge. 

And then we found this church along the road. Maybe not so historic, but cool anyway.

Georgia has tons of churches all around, all with cemetery's attached. Guess that's why it's called the bible belt.

On the way out of town we stopped at the Broad River, which lived up to it's name.

The kayakers were enjoying the summer heat. Looked like fun. We spotted about 5-6 of them working their way downstream.

And just past the river we found this sign about the KKK killing someone. Yep, we must be in Georgia. Can hardly wait to go home.

So we hit the road down to Macon, Georgia, where there is an awesome library with many genealogy resources, including early Georgia marriages where we have hopes to find Arthur Fowler marring Margaret Hawthorn around 1801/2. Wish us luck!