Kent Family From Virginia To Alabama And Beyond

January and February, 1925 volumes bound together as one.

Historian G. Ward Hubbs first encountered the Confederate soldiers known as the Greensboro Guards through their Civil War diaries and letters. Later he discovered that the Guards had formed some forty years before the war, soon after the founding of the Alabama town that was their namesake. Guarding Greensboro examines how the yearning for community played itself out across decades of peace and war, prosperity and want. Greensboro sprang up as a wide-open frontier town in Alabama's Black Belt, an exceptionally fertile part of the Deep South where people who dreamed of making it rich as cotton planters flocked. Although prewar Greensboro had its share of overlapping communities--ranging from Masons to school-improvement societies--it was the Guards who brought together the town's highly individualistic citizenry. A typical prewar militia unit, the Guards mustered irregularly and marched in their finest regalia on patriotic holidays. Most significantly, they patrolled for hostile Indians and rebellious slaves. In protecting the entire white population against common foes, Hubbs argues, the Guards did what Greensboro's other voluntary associations could not: move citizens beyond self-interest. As Hubbs follows the Guards through their Civil War campaigns, he keeps an eye on the home front: on how Greensborians shared a sense of purpose and sacrifice while they dealt with fears of a restive slave populace. Finally, Hubbs discusses the postwar readjustments of Greensboro's veterans as he examines the political and social upheaval in their town and throughout the South. Ultimately, Hubbs argues, the Civil War created the South of legend and its distinctive communities.

Mary Gordon Duffee's father, Matthew Duffee was born in Ireland and immigrated to Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1823. In Tuscaloosa he operated a popular tavern, and he later bought a resort hotel at Blount Springs. Mary Duffee was born in Alabama in 1840 and spent many summers with her family at the resort. It was the journey to and from Blount Springs that inspired Duffee's best-known work, Sketches of Alabama, which originally appeared as fifty-nine articles in the Birmingham Weekly Iron Age in 1886 and 1887. She also contributed articles to several out-of-state newspapers, wrote guide books, advertising copy, and poetry. She died in 1920. This collection contains typescripts of some of Mary Gordon Duffee's Iron Age columns "Sketches of Alabama," manuscripts of seven of Duffee's poems, a typed biographical sketch of Duffee, undated, and Duffee's obituary from the Birmingham Age-Herald.