Often on winter nights, I am awakened by the sound of the blasting at the marble quarry, which is only a mile or so from my home in Tate, Georgia. The sound travels well when the leaves are off the trees. The distant rumble is a reminder that it was from this ground that the marble for many famous architectural and artistic works originated in the red clay hills of the upper Piedmont. Most famous among these creators is sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), a self-taught, boy prodigy who became the best-known sculptor of memorial statues America has ever produced. Although of radically different temperaments, French was a friend and professional colleague of St. Gaudin, whose work I linked in my last post to the 54th “Colored Infantry Regiment” (as the Black units were officially labeled), the Shaw Memorial on Boston Common and that unit’s role in the Civil War in Georgia.
French shared with St. Gaudin the market for memorial statuary that was so popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among French’s “patrons” was the city of Savannah, which commissioned him to produce a sculpture of Georgia’s founder, General James Oglethorpe. Many places in Georgia are named for this great humanitarian-and perhaps more should be. And, there are other memorials to Oglethorpe, including the monument, once located atop Mount Oglethorpe near Jasper, Georgia (and visible from Tate as well). Constructed of marble from the Tate Quarry, the monument was moved to Jasper after vandals marred it some years ago. (It is located near the wooden bridge just north of the downtown.)
Conveniently forgotten for a couple of centuries is the fact that Oglethorpe in founding Georgia sought to avoid those things which flourished in neighboring South Carolina: lawyers, aristocratic planters and slaves. All were prohibited. This last of the English colonies was to be a refuge for the poor. Oglethorpe lost a close friend to the odious practice of imprisoning those who could not pay their debts in “debtors’ prisons.” He was never able to get prisoners released for settlement in Georgia, so the notion of Georgia being settled by convicts is not true. Many of the earlier colonies had been forced to accept convicts placed as indentured servants, a way to provide free labor to the struggling landowners. I am not alone in believing that Oglethorpe’s effort was the greatest humanitarian undertaking of his age. Tragically, Oglethorpe left Georgia in 1743 and the colony came under direct royal control. In the years that followed, the crown abandoned Oglethorpe’s prohibitions and Georgia followed South Carolina’s example, becoming a land of large-scale plantations manned by African slaves.
French’s statue of Ogelthorpe is arguably the finest memorial statuary in the state. But, French’s first statue is far more well known: it is of the “Minuteman” at the Concord Bridge. French won the commission in a contest at the young age of twenty-three..
The Tate Quarry continues to supply the demand for high quality marble. It is a hard and durable material and was used in restoring the White House and to carve the great memorial at the Alamo site. Because it is a hard marble, it is still often used for architectural applications. Because it is a hard marble, it was not used to build Georgia’s new state capitol building when the capital was moved from Milledgeville following the Civil War. It’s hardness made it expensive to quarry, so much so that less expensive Vermont marble won out as the material of choice. History is irony.
To view the page on St. Gauden and the connection to Darien, Georgia, go to
https://longleafjournal.com/historical-links-darien-georgia-the-civil-war-and-sculptor-augustus-st-gaudens/.
Fascinating! I am so proud of the fact that we have Georgia Marble and I tell others about the Lincoln memorial but I did not know about the sculpture/artist, French. And it is so interesting that French was a friend of St.Gaudens! I have of course toured the Tate Marble mine, and Georgia Marble company used to hold their major meetings at Lake Arrowhead, where I lived. Their giant photos of the mine at their meetings were so big and life like that it made me feel like I was right in the mine! And my renter in my house at Lake Arrowhead works for the company that owns the Tate Mable mine, Polycor. I love to learn about the monuments created from Georgia Marble. And I so admire the sculptors. Thank you for sharing info about them.