Upson-Talbot-Brooks County GaArchives Biographies.....Smith, Robert Lee June 20, 1861 - January 22, 1919
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
T. Bradford Willis http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00031.html#0007638 December 16, 2013, 10:11 am

Source: Smith family records
Author: Robert Lee Smith, II

By Robert Lee Smith, II


ROBERT LEE SMITH (1861-1919)

 
Robert Lee Smith was born 21 June 1861 in Upson County, Georgia, the youngest 
son of Anthony Garnett Smith, Jr., and his 2nd cousin, Elizabeth Murphy Smith. 
Elizabeth was the daughter of Charles Lee Smith, Sr., and Martha Glenn of 
Upson and Talbot Counties. Garnett was the eldest son of Anthony Garnett 
Smith, Sr., a Methodist minister, and Mary Allen of Crawford County, Georgia. 
Anthony and Elizabeth’s grandparents, Robert and Larkin Smith (respectively) 
were brothers. As veterans from Cumberland County, Virginia, they migrated to 
Wilkes (Oglethorpe) County, Georgia, shortly after the Revolution and settled 
on bounty homesteads. Larkin’s son, Charles, settled in Upson (Talbot) County 
before 1820. Robert’s son, the Reverend Anthony Garnett Smith, settled in 
Crawford County between 1832 and 1835. 
 
Robert Lee Smith was born into a nation at war. In the summer of 1865, the 
Union Army occupied Macon, and the food-stores, fodder, and livestock of out-
lying farms were confiscated for military use, leaving the civilians to 
starve. That August, Robert Lee’s ill, teenaged brother, Charles, was 
conscripted by Union raiders to help drive the family’s livestock to Macon. At 
the Union camp, an 
officer saw how sick Charles was and sent him away on the horse that he rode 
in upon. Charles
Anthony Smith died at home two weeks later, 04 September 1865. 
 
That returned horse was the sole draft animal used to plow and plant the next 
year’s crop. But the 
family survived, and Robert Lee grew to manhood on that very same farm and, in 
1889, when he married Elizabeth Stevens of Lee County, Alabama, it was there 
they set up housekeeping. Robert
Lee’s father died in 1891, and the eventual estate settlement inspired Robert 
Lee and Elizabeth to
move from Upson County to Talbot County about 1901 and, in 1906, to Brooks 
County, Georgia,
where Robert Lee would die of influenza 22 January 1919 on a rented, boll 
weevil ravaged farm. 
 
At the time of Robert Lee’s death, two sons, Ralph Phillip and Paul Herbert, 
were being separated
from the army, having served in Europe. Two sons, Charles Cole and Robert 
Howell, were yet at home with their mother, Elizabeth, and younger sister, 
Annie Lee. My father, Charlie Cole Smith,
said that his last cotton crop wouldn’t fill a pillow slip, and relocated the 
destitute family south to
East Palatka, Florida, where a small farm community was beginning to thrive 
(Robert Lee Smith).

Additional Comments:
The photograph of Wesley Asbury Smith, MD and Robert Lee Smith was taken by D. 
P. Sink, photographer, of Calvert, Texas. It is owned by T. Bradford Willis, 
DDS at the current time.


Photo: http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/upson/photos/bios/smith1041gbs.jpg

File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/ga/upson/bios/smith1041gbs.txt

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