Garnett Andrews was a jurist, writer, politician, and Know-Nothing candidate for governor, and the father of diarist Eliza Frances Andrews. He was born on October 30, 1798, to Ann Goode and John Andrews on the family plantation near Washington, Georgia, in Wilkes County. Andrews was one of sixteen children and, according to family records, the only child to live past middle age. Shortly after his admission to the bar, Andrews met Annulet Ball during one of the Ball family's summer trips to Washington. They were married in 1828. Andrews purchased Haywood, a small plantation house on the outskirts of Washington, and over the following years the couple had eight children, seven of whom reached adulthood. Andrew's daughter Eliza became a journalist, novelist, educator, and internationally recognized botanist. In 1859, after Andrew's unsuccessful race for the governorship, his long-time war partner, Isaiah Irvin, was killed in a steamboat accident off the coast of Texas. Andrews ran for Irvin's seat in the Georgia House of Representatives and was elected. In 1861 Andrews led a futile effort to oppose Georgia's secession from the Union. As reported in Andrews family documents, he believed that Georgia's position on slavery was protected by the U.S. Constitution and that secession would surely destroy the way of life that secessionists claimed to be protecting. His daughter Eliza later wrote that on the night Georgia seceded, Andrews paced in his closed and darkened house as Wilkes County residents celebrated in the Washington town square. She quoted her father as saying, "Poor fools! They may ring their bells now, but they will wring their hands - yes, and their hearts, too - before they are done with it." Andrews died on August 14, 1873, in Washington. With the exception of his oldest daughter, all of the Andrews children were buried in the Andrews family plot in Washington's Resthaven Cemetery. Garnett Andrews (1798-1873) - New Georgia Encyclopedia http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org (Retrieved February 17, 2009)
Eliza Francis Andrews was a writer, newspaper reporter, editor, columnist, social critic, scientist, and educator. By the time of her death in 1931 in Rome, Andrews had written three novels, more than a dozen scientific articles on botany, two internationally recognized botany textbooks, and dozens of articles, commentaries, and reports on topics ranging from politics to environmental issues. She was best known for her War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865, one of the most compelling first-person accounts of the Civil War (1861-1865) home front, published in 1908. When Union general William T. Sherman's troops approached Wilkes County in late 1864, Andrews and her younger sister, Metta, fled to their older sister's southwest Georgia plantation, located between Albany and Thomasville. Their journey is chronicled in Andrews' War-Time Journal, whose value to scholars lies as much in the detailed descriptions of the devastation that Sherman's forces inflicted as in the personal drama of the turmoil her own family experienced during the war's last months. Andrews died in Rome on January 21, 1931, at the age of ninety. She is buried in the family plot in Washington. Eliza Frances Andrews (1840-1931) - New Georgia Encyclopedia http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org (Retrieved February 17, 2009)
From the description of Andrews family photographs, circa 1865-1970. (University of Georgia). WorldCat record id: 317885851
