John Porter Fort

A Memorial
and
Personal Reminiscences

The Knickerbocker Press

New York
1918

Copyright, 1918

BY

MARTHA F. FORT

THE FOREWORD

The reminiscences of his life and work were dictated to me by my father during the summer of 1916. He touched only upon the main events. There are countless unmentioned things that would add to this story of a wonderfully full life, but I leave it just as he told it to me as we sat together on the porch, or in the library by the open wood fire. To these I have added a few tributes and some clippings from Georgia newspapers.

Martha Fannin Fort.

Jno P. Fort

IN MEMORY OF JOHN PORTER FORT

[Editorial from "The Constitution," Atlanta, Ga., Sunday, February 18, 1917]

THE WORK OF JOHN P. FORT

No man of his day accomplished more in the nature of everlasting benefit for the state in which he lived than the late John P. Fort did for Georgia.

He was a man of vision—a dreamer—but with the energy and the faith and the resourcefulness to push ahead, explore his vision, and make his dreams come true; and in the doing of which he made of himself a notable public benefactor.

Especially thankful should south Georgia be for the very revolutionizing of the health conditions of that section which he did so much to bring about.

South Georgia was once afflicted with a malarial condition which seriously impaired the many advantages of that part of the state. The development of the country had been held back through generation after generation, despite its fertility and adaptability to agriculture, simply because of malarial conditions.

John P. Fort turned his attention to the problem.

"It's the water," he said. And he set himself the task of finding a remedy.

With no guide save his reason and determination, he managed somehow to bore a hole into the earth more than five hundred feet deep; and was rewarded by a stream of pure, life-giving water. That was Georgia's first artesian well; and, as he says in a remarkable letter to Alfred C. Newell, written in October, 1907, and reproduced in the magazine section of this issue of The Constitution:

"The well has furnished drinking water during the summer time mostly for a circular area of ten or more miles in diameter for twenty-six years, parties coming in wagons with utensils to convey the water away for drinking purposes."

That well, still flowing undiminished, proved the rejuvenation of South Georgia. It was followed by the boring of hundreds of others, and the result is that to-day residents of South Georgia are as free from the taint of malaria as are those of "the hills of Habersham."

The genius of the man again was manifested when, sensing the possibilities of the timber resources of south Georgia swamps, always before his day looked upon as worthless and inaccessible, he managed to get capital interested, and, under his guiding hand, the cypress lumber production of the state became one of its great industries.

What he did for the fruit—especially the apple—industry in North Georgia is known to every man at all conversant with the state's development.

A lake in the southern part of the state covered acres of fertile soil. Generation after generation of men had found no means of drainage. Fort found one. He studied the geological formation of the country, applied the knowledge he had gained by his artesian well operations, and reasoned that probably the lake could be drained—as no man ever had drained a lake before—from beneath. So he exploited his theory, bored a hole straight downward in the center of the lake; and the waters ran out, leaving the bed ready for the plow.

"The inhabitants of the pond were left on the muddy bottom," he writes to Mr. Newell, "among which was a large alligator. A strange and wonderful sight to behold!"

And thus he spent his useful, constructive, busy life; doing original—often daring—things, all for