Henry Ford’s Georgia connection

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Automotive magnate Henry Ford wintered in Georgia at his estate near Richmond Hill during the 1930s and 1940s. Ford was active in civic life in Georgia and is credited with building schools and churches in the area, including the George Washington Carver School where he is pictured below with students.

Ford built the school for African Americans as part of his effort to improve educational opportunities for Richmond Hill residents.

The industrialist visited WSB radio in 1922 as the guest of the Atlanta Journal editor, Major John Cohen (right), who is credited with spearheading the effort to transmit the first commercial radio signal in the South (more can be read about this at GeorgiaInfo). The information and images in this post come from the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

Ford, Firestone and Edison

There are also  images in the Vanishing Georgia collection, including this 1914 photograph (left) of Ford along with Harvey Firestone and Thomas Edison.

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Civil War in the American South

Update 2/24/2021: This website is no longer begin maintained by the DLG.

From the ASERL press release:

ATLANTA—(April 4, 2011)—Over the past 18 months, members of the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) have been developing a new, collaborative web portal to provide one-stop access to materials about the American Civil War Era, 1850 through 1865. The new website, www.american-south.org , was launched today to connect users to primary-source materials held across ASERL libraries about the intellectual and cultural underpinnings of the Civil War. The site currently links to more than 3,600 digitized items, and is expected to grow to more than 5,000 items in the near future.

“ASERL libraries have vast and uniquely valuable collections relating to the American Civil War Era,” commented John Ulmschneider, ASERL’s Board President and University Librarian at Virginia Commonwealth University. “We knew the sesquicentennial would raise public interest about the War, so we developed this new website to make these once-hidden collections available for scholars, students, and the public to discover, explore, and enjoy.”

ASERL libraries are selecting and digitizing materials from their collections to contribute to this shared website. The items vary from manuscripts and letters to sermons, economic data, and other types of publications. They all share a common link: all were written and published during the Civil War Era, 1850 through 1865, and all document the intellectual and cultural milieu leading up to and defining the Era. The www.american-south.org website was developed for ASERL by the Digital Library of Georgia, and features advanced search functionalities to help users quickly discover the items they seek and to browse the collection by specific filters, including contributing library, format, and other aspects of the collection.

“As research librarians, we are delighted to see this shared collection come online,” noted Ulmschneider. “What would have been disparate, local collections now have increased public visibility and much greater utility for scholars and students, with a single, shared search tool. The www.american-south.org website will become an invaluable tool for researchers, students, and educators as we learn more about the American Civil War.”

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