Lake Seminole

Pictured here is my Great-Grandfather, Fred Faircloth. circa 1918.

My Grandfather was a field laborer, and homesteader, like many were in Southwest Georgia in those days.  He worked his body to the bone to afford a small plot of land in Seminole County, Georgia, close to the site of Lake Seminole before it was flooded and damned into one of the biggest lakes in Georgia

as it is today. He grew vegetables for the family, and raised turkeys and chickens for the meat and eggs. Deer were hunted and eaten as well. Some days he worked as a laborer and some days he went out with a group of men, mostly poor and black, to collect turpentine from the long leaf pines. They would carry huge metal buckets strapped to their backs for collecting the sap. This, of course, was before all the Long Leaf Pines were cut down. I grew up playing on his swamp land in the house that he built by hand. It was here that I was motivated to identify species of snake, mostly in attempt to convince my grandmother to stop killing the non-venomous ones. 

 When I think of the word "farmer", my great-grandfather is who I think of, even though he might not have called himself one at the time.  His old house has since been sold and the first thing the new owners did was cut down the massive old oaks on the property to sell them for timber. 

As they say, there is a "special place in hell". 

My Grandmother, Ruby-Jean Faircloth on our small family farm, Seminole County, circa 1938

Kolomoki Mounds, Blakely, Georgia

Kolomoki Mounds is the largest and oldest protected Woodland Indian site in the southeastern United States. 










Native plant, (yucca filamentosa)



(gopherus polyphemus)
The sandy soils here in the Southwest Georgia coastal plain are home to the endangered gopher tortoise. Several burrows, including this one, can be found within walking distance of the visitor's center.



When I was a little girl I remember going on a field trip to visit  Kolomoki mounds. Looking back, I am so glad our teachers found this place important enough to visit, even though at the time the very disturbing theatrics performed scared the bejesus out of all of us. Inside the museum and visitors center one can see the actual remains of an excavated mound, and at that time actors performed some kind of bad rendition of a ritual dance full with feathers and stereotypical pow wow chants as if they got the entire skit from a black and white country western movie. I just remember having this utterly horrible feeling that THIS IS SO WRONG. It was a desecration of a sacred space that was being turned into a tourist attraction.   I honestly don't know if they do this anymore, but if they do I just hope that someone with actual native blood is being paid for the performance.



(Solenopsis invicta)
also known as the Red Imported Fire Ant, making one of their colonies on this young Long Leaf Pine tree.  Be careful of these ants if you hike here, because they attack quickly when disturbed and inflict a painful sting that will burn and itch for days.