A Memorial and Personal Reminiscences The Knickerbocker Press New York 1918 Copyright , 1918 BY MARTHA F. FORT...

The reminiscences of his life and work were dictated to me by my father during the summer of 1916. He touched only upon the main events. There are countless unmentioned things that would add to this story of a wonderfully full life, but I leave it just as he told it to me as we sat together on the porch, or in the library by the open wood fire. To these I have added a few tributes and some clippings from Georgia newspapers. Martha Fannin Fort. Jno P. Fort...

THE WORK OF JOHN P. FORT No man of his day accomplished more in the nature of everlasting benefit for the state in which he lived than the late John P. Fort did for Georgia. He was a man of vision—a dreamer—but with the energy and the faith and the resourcefulness to push ahead, explore his vision, and make his dreams come true; and in the doing of which he made of himself a notable public benefactor. Especially thankful should south Georgia be for the very revolutionizing of the health conditio

My father, Dr. Tomlinson Fort, was born in Burke County, Georgia, July 14, 1787. He was the son of Arthur Fort, who was a soldier in the Revolutionary War and a prominent man in the pioneer days of Georgia. My father studied medicine at the Philadelphia Medical College under the famous Dr. Rush to whose memory he was ever attached. He returned to Georgia settling at Milledgeville, then the capital of the State. He had a large medical practice, the most extensive in middle Georgia, which he kept

When I returned from the army I had a severe cough and was in a very run down condition. Brother George feared that I had an incipient case of tuberculosis. So in the fall of 1865 I went down to a plantation in Sumter County to try to recover my health by living out of doors. That winter I lived the life of a hunter, the gun constantly in my hand. During the four years of the war the game had not been hunted at all, consequently it had increased in great abundance. I was very successful in killi

Speaking of John P. Fort reminds me that to him is due the credit of introducing artesian wells in southwestern Georgia, where he owned large farming lands. He desired to protect and improve the health of his tenants and other laborers by freeing them from the necessity of drinking the rotten limestone water in shallow wells which was considered productive of chills, fever, and other sickness. So this progressive Maconite decided to experiment with artesian wells and he had one bored on one of h

Col. John P. Fort, a graduate of Oglethorpe College, and one of the men who first got a vision of the future possibilities of Rabun County's apples, was in Clayton, Wednesday. Colonel Fort owns one of the finest orchards in the county at Mountain City, and has done more in the way of growing fine fruits and advertising northeast Georgia, thereby enhancing the value of our mountain lands, than any other one man. Colonel Fort is now about seventy-one years of age, but is still very active. He join

Colonel John P. Fort is one of the sure-enough progressives of the State. His progressivism is not destructive like that of the Western politicians, but is of the sort that promotes the welfare of his State. It is well-known that he gave to Georgia her first artesian well. Albany followed his example and became the "Artesian City," appropriate sobriquet—for it is a city of artesian wells. Some couple of years ago or more Colonel Fort decided to experiment with truck gardening on his Dougherty Co

For Colonel Fort was a distinguished citizen of this State, and was widely known as a pioneer in many fields of activity. He it was who bored the first artesian well in Georgia. A great many men laughed at him when he declared, after carefully studying the geology of this section, that he would sink a well to water-bearing strata several hundred feet below the surface, and that through that well purer water than the people of south Georgia had ever drunk would flow to the surface. That was thirt

It was the belief of the late Col. John P. Fort that much of southwest Georgia, including all the western part of Dougherty County, would one day blossom into a veritable garden spot as the result of a peculiar natural condition. Colonel Fort bored the first artesian well in this section, and had made a lifelong study of the geology of the southern part of the State. He contended that a flowing artesian well might be secured almost anywhere in this region, but it was his belief that in the terri

I received a letter from Mr. Alfred C. Newell concerning a memorial to the memory of Col. John P. Fort. The letter in part reads: "I note that John P. Fort, of Mount Airy, is dead. I write you this because it seems to me a movement should be initiated by some one to establish a memorial to this great man. He would not want a monument. He would be the last man in the world to care for anything like display. It seems to me, however, entirely fitting that a special appropriation could be made by th

Editor the Journal : I notice in a recent issue of the Journal the death of Colonel John P. Fort at Tampa, Fla., on the 12th inst. His home was in Mount Airy, Ga. In 1863 President Davis appointed John P. Fort a lieutenant in the First regiment of Georgia regulars, stationed at Hammocks Landing on the Appalachicola River, in Florida. The first time I saw Lieutenant Fort under fire was at Lake City, Fla., on the 10th of February, 1864. He was in command of the skirmish line of the regulars, tryin

Colonel John P. Fort Since our last annual meeting death has removed one of the most honored members of our association. We not only owe his memory a page in our minutes but the younger and especially the future members, those who shall preserve this valued organization, would name us recalcitrant to the true interests of our society if we failed to pay tribute to this advanced thinker, practical scientist, friend of humanity, evinced by his lifelong devotion to horticulture, and advocate of all