Tag Archives: Thomas Banner Burge

Georgia plantation wife from Maine, part 3

After Union soldiers stole three mules from Burge plantation near Covington, Georgia on August 2, 1864, Dolly Lunt Burge could only wonder if the Yankees would return. Born in Bowdoinham, Maine in 1817, Dolly had moved south to teach school in rural Georgia. She married Thomas Banner Burge, a wealthy plantation owner, and gave birth […]

Georgia plantation wife from Maine, part 2

Through spring and early summer 1864, William Tecumseh Sherman and Joe Johnston conducted their side-stepping campaign that brought Sherman’s Union army to the Atlanta outskirts. Commanding the Army of Tennessee, Johnston discovered that almost every natural defense position he tried to hold, Sherman outflanked the defending Confederates, who withdrew deeper into Georgia. Angry that Johnston […]

Georgia plantation wife from Maine, part 1

Revealing that she was from Maine would not have saved Dolly Burge a single chicken when Sherman’s “Bummers” came calling in mid-November 1864. Some Mainers moved South in the decades before the Civil War and, when the shooting began, promptly forgot their Yankee roots. Maine-born men fought for the Confederacy, and Maine-born women like Burge […]