"Cloverdale" was a successful plantation established by Colonel James Cooper Nisbet and his brother. At the start of the war, James Nisbet raised a company for the 21st Georgia Infantry Regiment and went to Virginia as a Captain. In the spring of 1863, Nisbet was promoted to Colonel and sent back to Macon, Georgia, to raise a regiment. Colonel Nisbet's parents were at the plantation when General William Haines Lytle, a Federal brigade commander on his way to Chickamauga, stopped there. Lytle, who had served with distinction during the Mexican War, later became a lawyer in Ohio and a published poet. He appeared charmed by the social graces of the Nisbet family, and when Mrs. Nisbet told him both her sons were in the Confederate Army, he said that he respected her adherence to a principle she thought right, that on his side were men fighting who were animated by inherited prejudices and old issues begun long before in England, and that he was fighting to preserve the Union of the States, but did not make war on women and children or wantonly destroy private property. Nevertheless, while Lytle and his staff had a pleasant dinner in the house, men of his brigade looted the estate. Two former Confederate soldiers who had served in Virginia with Colonel Nisbet but had become "home made Yankees" were guiding the Federal Army, and after assuring the soldiers that meat, silver, and other valuables were hidden on the property, much damage was done by digging. Commanding the 66th Georgia Infantry Regiment, Colonel Nisbet took part in the Atlanta campaign. Captured near Atlanta, he spent the rest of the war in Johnson's Island prison. After the war he returned to find Cloverdale, once one of Georgia's model stock farms in 1861, in a wrecked condition, with its stock gone and its fencing destroyed, and he set to work rebuilding it. The first man he employed was James Hawkins, who had deserted from his company in Virginia and later guided Federal soldiers to the house; Nisbet told him that the war was over, but that if he had caught him during the war while plundering the farm, he would have filled him full of bullets. Hawkins, still wearing a Federal uniform coat, went to work in the fields. Nisbet later recalled that during the winters of '65 and '66 business in the South slowly revived, railroads were being rebuilt, Black laborers made contracts to work plantations on shares or for wages, and cotton brought a high price. He served several terms in the Georgia Legislature and helped the state through Reconstruction.

Photo: Public domain

Photo: Duane and Tracy Marsteller