Chapter 1: Son of the Wilderness (1789–1812)

His name was William A. Goolsby, and he came into a world on the edge of history—too late for revolution, too early for security.

His parents, Burgess Goolsby and Elizabeth Bird Allison, were among the early white settlers staking claims in northeast Georgia. They lived in a land that still belonged—spiritually and historically—to the Creek and Cherokee, whose footpaths wound through pine forests and whose presence was slowly, violently being erased by the creeping lines of white settlement.

William was one of eleven siblings, born into a household that likely rose before dawn and worked until dark. There were no towns nearby, just fields carved by hand, cabins warmed by firewood, and a world shaped by seasons, survival, and sweat.

By the time he could walk, he would have learned the rhythm of farm life: plowing, planting, chopping, hauling, learning to read weather as well as any book. He learned to make things last, to help his mother preserve food for winter, to mend what broke, and to keep his boots dry for Sunday service.

In 1795, when William was six years old, Georgia erupted in scandal.

The state had quietly sold 35 million acres of western territory—much of it still Indigenous land—in what became known as the Yazoo Land Fraud. The public backlash was swift and violent. Settlers felt betrayed. Politicians burned the original land contracts in public. It was a lesson in greed, and for families like the Goolsbys, it was also a warning: even land could vanish beneath your feet.

But the Goolsbys stayed. William grew stronger. The forests around Goose Pond were slowly replaced with pasture. A town post might have opened. A few more roads, a few more names on a census. But the world was still small, and the stakes still immediate.

And then came war.

In 1812, at the age of 23, William enlisted in the Georgia Militia, answering the nation’s call to arms. He served as a private in Company 2 of the 2nd Regiment under Captain Thomas. Whether he saw battle or simply guarded home soil, what mattered was this: he stood ready to defend a country still defining its borders and its soul.

By then, William had grown from a barefoot farm boy into a man of presence—tall, grounded, rooted like the oak trees that lined the old trails near Goose Pond.

And on October 22, 1812, he married Ann Sorrow—a woman as formidable as her name suggested. She was his match in resilience and resolve.

Together, they would build a family not measured in gold—but in sons, daughters, fields, and the hard-earned dignity of rural life.

Chapter 2: Raising a Republic of Children (1812–1830)

When William A. Goolsby married Ann Sorrow in the fall of 1812, he had already seen the edges of the wilderness pushed back by the plow. Now, he turned his full attention to building something even more daunting than a homestead:

A family.

Over the next twenty-four years, William and Ann would bring twenty-three children into the world. Twenty-three.

The Goolsby home became less a household and more a small nation—filled with children of every age, all moving, working, squabbling, growing. There were always clothes to mend, mouths to feed, rows to weed, and shoes to resole. Babies were passed from hip to hip. Boys were given axes before they were tall enough to carry them properly. Girls learned how to churn, stitch, and manage a kitchen like a quartermaster’s tent.

There was no luxury. But there was structure.

William ran the farm with precision. He knew how many ears of corn it took to feed his house through winter, how many hogs to butcher by November, how many gallons of molasses to keep sealed in stoneware jars. And he expected his sons to know the same.

Ann was the heart of the house—soft-spoken, fiercely competent, moving through chaos with the steadiness of a woman who had borne nearly two dozen children and lived to tell it. She buried some of them too—early graves, marked only by wooden crosses or names whispered in prayer.

By the 1820s, William had expanded his landholdings. He was now appearing regularly in Oglethorpe and Clarke County records, his name recognized among the white farming elite of northeastern Georgia.

But there was another, darker ledger where his name began to appear.

By 1830, William was listed in the Oglethorpe County Slaveholder Index.

Whether he began with one person or several, the record is clear: William A. Goolsby was now a slaveholder, a participant in the system that underpinned Southern wealth and Southern terror. The Goolsby fields—like so many others—were worked not only by children, but by Black men, women, and children forced into labor under a regime of violence, coercion, and ownership.

This fact cannot be softened.

Whatever his love for his own family, William’s prosperity came—at least in part—through the subjugation of others. And that contradiction lives at the heart of his legacy.

But within the house, he was still father, still husband, still anchor.

Evenings were spent by the hearth. Psalms were sung softly. Food was shared. Babies fell asleep on older siblings’ laps. And William, now a man in his 40s, sat quietly at the head of the table—surveying a world he had built through blood, sweat, and silence.

He had come from wilderness.

Now he presided over a compound of kin, crop, and contradiction.

Chapter 3: Patriarch in the Age of Cotton (1830–1845)

By the 1830s, William A. Goolsby was no longer simply a farmer.

He was a landowner, a patriarch, and the head of one of the largest households in Clarke County. The man born in Goose Pond, raised in the soft wilds of northeast Georgia, now commanded a world made of cotton, kin, and control.

His land spread across the hills and hollers near Lexington, bounded by cedar fences and narrow wagon roads. His children—nearly two dozen of them—now moved through the world with the name Goolsby like a title. Some had married. Some were managing plots of land nearby. Some still worked the home place, sowing rows and fixing wagons.

But all of them knew their father’s rules.

William was a man of structure. Of discipline. He didn’t tolerate laziness. He expected every child to earn their keep, and every field to yield.

He also expected his enslaved laborers to do the same.

By this time, William’s name was recorded in slaveholder indexes and tax digests, marking him as the legal owner of Black men, women, and children whose labor sustained the Goolsby estate. Their names were not written down. But their work was everywhere: in the cotton fields, in the smokehouse, in the garden plots, in the long shadows behind the family home.

William’s success—his land, his harvests, his reputation—was built on an unspoken foundation of suffering.

Whether he saw them as property or as people remains lost to history. But the record is clear: he benefited from bondage, and his family did too.

And yet, on Sundays, William may have led his family to church. A simple wooden structure with whitewashed walls and hard benches. The preacher would’ve spoken of grace, of repentance, of God’s order in all things. And William, solemn in his Sunday coat, would’ve nodded quietly.

This was the paradox of Southern faith: scripture beside slavery, hymns beside chains.

In 1830, the federal government passed the Indian Removal Act, beginning the forced expulsion of the Creek and Cherokee from Georgia. William would have witnessed it—not as a protester, but as a beneficiary. Land once held by nations was now open to settlers like him.

And he took it.

His wealth grew. His sons found brides. His daughters married into neighboring families. The Goolsby name appeared more frequently in deeds, court records, and church rosters.

By the 1840s, William was in his fifties. Still farming. Still fathering. Still feared and respected in equal measure.

His hair was gray now. His hands still strong. His eyes, maybe, more tired.

He had built an empire of his own making—on land cleared with violence, worked by bondage, and filled with the sound of his name spoken over supper tables across Clarke and Oglethorpe counties.

But empires do not last.

And his twilight was coming.

Chapter 4: The Last Harvest (1845–1854)

By 1845, William A. Goolsby was an old man by the standards of his time. He had seen a nation rise from frontier violence to agricultural might. He had watched his name multiply—on land deeds, tax rolls, church pews, and the mouths of grandchildren now toddling where he once walked barefoot behind a plow.

But the house was quieter now.

In 1846, his wife Ann Sorrow Goolsby died.

She was the mother of twenty-three children, the matriarch of a household that ran on her discipline and her whispered prayers. She had survived childbirth more times than most women survived at all. She had buried children. She had held this family together while William held the land.

Her absence was a rupture.

The older daughters stepped in to manage the house. Sons took on more of the farm. But William, for the first time, moved with a slowness not caused by age, but by loss.

He still rode out to the fields.

Still attended church in his dark coat.

Still scrawled notes in ledgers, calculating bushels and credit owed.

But something had changed.

The country was changing too. In Washington, the debates over slavery were reaching a boil. In Kansas, men were already beginning to kill each other over it. But here in Clarke and Oglethorpe Counties, the rhythms of cotton and bondage continued like clockwork.

William’s name continued to appear in tax digests—his estate still productive, his enslaved laborers still accounted for as “property,” their names never written, but their bodies still bound.

He had lived a long life. A powerful one. A complicated one.

And in 1854, at the age of 65, William A. Goolsby died in Oglethorpe County.

He died just seven years before Fort Sumter, before the fire came, before the world he had built would be tested and torn.

He did not live to see the war.

He did not live to see the end of slavery.

He did not live to see his grandchildren scatter across the South, or march north in search of something freer than what Georgia could offer.

But he left behind something that endured:

A name.
A family.
And a question.

What do we do with the past that raised us?