If you’re new to Georgia, you have to learn things. I had to be told about Nancy Hart.
She’s a historical character, the subject of an article in the New Georgia Encyclopedia. But she’s also become folk hero, maybe not as big as Paul Bunyan or as magical as Pecos Pete, but a legend. It’s hard to tell what’s history and what’s tall tale.
During the Revolutionary War, Mrs. Hart and her husband lived in what was then called the backcountry near the Broad River, about 80 miles east of Stone Mountain. She was an ardent patriot. Georgia had a lot of loyalists.
One day when her husband was away with the militia, six loyalists came by on the trail of a rebel leader. Nancy Hart told the loyalists she had no idea where the man was, although she’d just helped him escape.
The loyalists didn’t believe her. One of them shot her prized turkey and demanded that she cook it for them. The loyalists also demanded drink.
Mrs. Hart brought out some wine. She sent her daughter Sukey to the spring for water and told her quietly to blow the conch shell that she kept there to warn the neighbors.
The six loyalists began to enjoy the wine. They’d stacked their guns in the corner of the cabin, and Mrs. Hart began to pass guns out to her daughter one at a time.
When one of the loyalists saw what was going on, he jumped up.
Nancy Hart warned him she’d shoot.
He didn’t believe her.
She shot him dead.
A second loyalist tested her and was also shot dead.
Mrs. held the survivors until the neighbors arrived to help hang them. Judicial proceedings were informal in those days.
The story sounds a bit like a tall tale. But when state engineers were building a highway by the old cabin in 1912, they found the bones of six people buried side by side.
• Source: Clay Ouzts, “Nancy Hart”; New Georgia Encyclopedia. The article is here:
https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/nancy-hart-ca-1735-1830/
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