Albert Martin Ayres I : Memoirs

By Iris Margaret Ayres Smale

Memoirs of my Great-Grandfather who lived between 1843 and 1922, was a prisioner during the Civil War and generally lead a very interesting life... obviously quite different from ours in the 21st century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257464197

Book preview

cvr

Albert Martin Ayres I Memoirs

born in macon, georgia in october 1843

died in 1922

buried in family cemetery on georgia mountain, marshall County, Alabama

© 2004 by iris margaret ayres smale

all rights reserved

Published through Lulu

3131 RDU Center

Suite 210

morrisville, NC 27560

USA

http://www.lulu.com

available at: http://my.lulu.com/iris

Dedication

To my Mother, who helped me with the translation before she became too ill with Alzheimer's.

And, to my husband, Chuck; and

my dear friend, Annise who both proof-read for me.

AND, to my grandchildren Matthew, A.J., Brandon, Markie, Nathan, Brittany, Foster, and Ariel who maybe someday will enjoy reading these pages and learning something about their family heritage.

Introduction

Albert Martin Ayres I ~ was my Great Grandfather ~ and I have worked on and off for several years (1989-2004) to put this into readable form. The original was written by hand in the fany script of his day….very difficult (and sometimes impossible) to read.

My notes (Iris Margant Ayres Smale) are all in italics………… I finished ‘translating’ on January 1, 2000 ~ appropriate to look back, as we enter a new millennium. Though it's taken me several more years to actually do anything with the edited version, and as we enter the latter half of 2004 I'm trying to finally get it in book form.

Some words ae no longer in use in tody's English, and some places may no longer exist (at leat not by the name known then)...but none have ben intentionally changed.

Proper names were spelled as correctly as possible from his handwriting. Sentences, paragraphs and punctuation seemd not to matter much, so I have tried to break it into readable paragraphs and chapters. Underlined question marks (???????) are where I just could not figure out the word or phrase.

The book is not in strict chronological order. He wrote at intervals after his retirement, and recorded events simply as they came to mind. (I've read & re-read it so many times, I've tried to piece it into understandable time frames.)

He was educated at Perth Amboy in New Jersy, and Yonkers & Cornwall in New York. He was a Confedrate war veteran, was captured and confined in a Yankee prison.

After the Civil War, General Ira Foster asked his friend Georgia Governor Brown to send him a young engineer to north Alabama to survey and build him a road up Georgia Mountain (in Marshall County). Asher Ayres in Macon, GA was a good friend of the Governor and so his son, Albert, was that young Engineer. After building the road and marrying the general's daughter, Nancy Albert settled on the mountain where he lived until his dath. (He mentions that he boarded with the Foster family earlier, so he obviously already knew Nancy.) I have not been able to determine just when this would have been as General Foster moved his family from Georgia to Alabama right at the end of the Civil War – so perhaps it was prior to the war. I do remember family stories that Nancy was in school with one or more of his sisters.

He was a Civil Engineer who surveyed many roads in Georgia and Alabama and was later elected Probate Judge of Marshall County, Alabama.

Chapter 1….

Childhood and Macon

I was bom in Macon, Georgia, October 23, 1843. Bom in the house now occupied by Mrs. Nutting, (at the original writing on the corner of Walnut and 3rd Streets (…in 1999 a bank stands on the location) Parents; Asher Ayres, who came to Macon from Woodbridge, NJ and Mary Ann Cutter, whose mother was a Salzburger, a sect which settled old Ebenezer, near Savannah. Her father was a son of a Cutter and Sumner of Mass. My ancestry on my mother's side originated at New Castle on Tyrey and came from there to Boston about 1640. My mother's only sister was named Kathryn, after this Grandmother who died at the age of 20, leaving one child, my grandfather. My grandfather on my father's side was also named Asher Ayres.

Legend says that our name originated at the Battle of Hastings. William the Conqueror was reared by a man named Truelove. William told him his name should be Aye for Aye you have given me.

I was named for a cousin of my father, Albert Martin, who was a hardware merchant on Greenwich Street in New York.

One of my first recollections was of the loss of my Aunt Kathryn on a track between Charleston and New York. Her husband was saved and afterwards went to Oshkosh, Wisc.

My first school teacher, Mrs. Burnes was lost at the same time.

My father's brother, James, also came to Macon. He designed and built many of the fine brick buildings and homes in Macon. He never married and died at about 59 years of age.

My Grandmother Cutter lived at the foot of Fort Hill in East Macon. Fort Hill was so called because Fort Hawkins, an important frontier post, was situated on it a hundred years ago (would have been around 1820). The old fort and block house at one time had a garrison of 800 men with officers of artillery. I was very fond of Grandmother and one of my early recollections is of running away from home and going to her house. At that time we lived a mile or so from her.

My next school teacher was Mrs. Wakeman on 4th Street. The house is still standing, a wooden building, and well I remember how I often graced the dunce block and wore the dunce cap. Findlay's Foundry at that time stood on the corner of Walnut and 4th Streets. We boys had organized a military company and with much pomp and ceremony, we challenged the boys at the foundry for a battle. We marched up the street in military order but the boys attacked us from behind trees with pieces of iron and other missiles and made us retreat in great disorder.

My next school teacher was Mrs. Mitchell. I don't have much recollection of her school, but I remember fighting one day when the teacher was out of the room and how surprised I was after school in withdrawing my hand from my pocket I found I had a hand full of hair.

My next teachers were Phil and Lit Tracy, the latter married in Huntsville. Both were killed during the war (Civil War). The latter a General.

The next and last teacher in Macon was Mr. Sylvan Bates. I have had many serious accidents in my life and it seemed the most serious happened while going to him. Returning from school one afternoon a crowd of us boys stopped to look at the ruins of old Washington block which had burned the night before. I saw the bricks slowly sliding out at the base of a tall chimney….I was standing at the cellar steps at the time. I shouted to the boys and we ran into the street, spreading out into a fan. The bricks must have disintegrated from the top of the chimney. I found myself on the ground in a cloud of dust and bricks. My head became matted with blood but apparently I wasn't badly hurt. The little boy at my side had his leg all broken up and I think he was crippled until he died. Someone scratching among the bricks found one of my books and decided I must be under the bricks, but I had gotten my other books and gone home rubbing my head.

Another time, fishing on a steep sloping bank, I slipped in but my yells brought all the brick yard hands to my rescue. Another time I was getting muscadines in a tall tree, and I fell but luckily caught in the vines a few feet below.

What came near being a tragic occurrence later....Jim McDonald (killed at Gettysburg) gave me the barrel of an old Queen Ann musket, sawed off short. This, I mounted on a candle box for a cannon. In the house yard, next to the fence, was a row of wash tubs between the two gates entering the garden, and in the garden there was a straight walk from back to front - 210 feet long. A summer house near the front with a cross walk through it from the house yard. I loaded my cannon with plenty of powder, then filled it with marbles, beads, buckshot and musket balls and placed the cannon in the summer house trained down the long walk. I put a long train of paper leading to the touch hole and set fire to it. Then I stepped to the gate and told Adaline if she heard a big noise it was only my cannon and she stepped to the other gate and warned her mother. I stepped back to the gate and lo' and behold, here stood old Aunt Polly, right in front of the cannot! I guess she was a 200 pounder.

Well, I stormed and raged and danced around trying to get her out of the walk and she said: You ought to be ashamed to talk to your old Auntie that way but she finally did get off the walk just in time! The next moment there was a great roar and a storm of missiles swept the walk and went through the fence or stuck in the upright plank. The cannon tore loose from the box and ploughed its way to the front fence.

Chapter 2….

Slaves in Macon

My first nurse was a free quadroon or oclaron woman named Annitte. She went with my mother and spent a winter in New York and New Jersey. She was a very pretty woman and seemed to create something of a sensation in NY. Her daughter married the first Congressman from our district (after the War), Jeff Long, who was a tailor and made my uniform when I entered the Army (said uniform, I believe cost about $800) (Confederate money and inflation was terrible). Being a free woman of color she had to pass herself off as a slave to return south. Her children, 2 girls and 1 boy were all white.

The first Negro my father ever owned was a gigantic river pilot named Red Hawkins. We children were very fond of him. He would bring us shells from the coast on his trips to Macon. The steamboat ran from Macon to Savannah. A yellow girl hired by my father, I actually taught to read and write, and after she went to her owner she wrote me a letter. Father, seeing how fond the children were of her, tried to buy her but couldn't. My father owned several Negroes...Orange & Polly from North Carolina. She was our cook and Orange worked about the place. He was a very good old fellow. He and Polly had 20 children.

I often went into Orange's quarters at night. He could read and in reading his Bible, he and I had many disputes over the pronunciation of different words. Incidentally, he allowed me the privilege of smoking his old pipe. One daughter and one son of theirs also belonged to father. Adaline, the girl, had a baby named Rabbit—the bow-leggidest being I think I ever saw. My sister and a cousin, Mary Martin, visiting from New York, made a great pet of her.

My father also owned a very old man, a preacher, and also a man named Cooper, who used to tell me of the times he made kegs for the Indians to hold their fire water.

While I was yet a small boy, my father took for a debt a young girl from East Tennessee. Her name was Agnes, but that was too hard a name for the children to pronounce so Mother changed her name to Jane. She was a fair haired, blue eyed girl, no appearance of Negro