The Diary of Dolly Lunt Burge

The Diary of Dolly Lunt Burge is the compelling story of an ordinary woman rising to meet extraordinary challenges in nineteenth-century Georgia. Dolly Lunt Burge’s full life was remakable for the range of roles she filled and the myriad experiences she had. That her life span coincided with critical transformations in America and that she recorded her experiences within this historical context make her diary all the more noteworthy. Having moved from Maine with her physician husband in the 1840s, Dolly lost her husband and her only living child to illness by the time she began the diary at age thirty. A devout and self-sufficient schoolteacher, she soon married her second husband, Thomas Burge, a planter and widowed father of four. Upon his death in 1858, Dolly ran the plantation independently through the Civil War, remaining on the land during Sherman’s infamous march through the area. After making the transition from slave labor to tenant farming, Dolly was married a third and final time to the Rev. William Parks, a prominent Methodist minister. Throughout it all, Dolly recorded the changes in her life and her country, describing her surroundings, friends, family, and feelings in thoughtful, moving language. Originally published in part as A Woman’s Wartime Journal: An Account of Sherman’s Devastation of a Southern Plantation (1918), this journal was published in its entirety in 1962. This second full publication, based on a new transcription from the original manuscript, benefits from important scholarship accomplished during the past thirty-five years. It draws on extensive census and probate records, includes newly available family photographs, and offers new information on thegenealogy of the African Americans from the Burge plantation.