Athens Review Centennial Edition
September, 1950
Mrs. Easterling Planted First Flowers In Athens

   Mrs. Georgia A. Easterling, one of the first settlers in Henderson County, is credited with 
having planted the first flowers where Athens now stands.
   Mrs. Easterling was born in Monroe County, Georgia, and educated at Milledgeville when
that city was capital of the state.
   Her first marriage was to C. B. Meredith at Gordon Springs, Georgia.  They came to Texas
from Georgia in wagons and located in Athens when the public square was nothing but a
thicket.
   After living in Athens a few years she returned to Georgia a widow.  In 1860 she married
again, this time to Judge James M. Easterling.
   During the war she was in the track of Sherman's mad march to the sea.  While her husband 
was serving in the Confederate army, Mrs. Easterling was at home standing at the spinning
wheel and pushing the shuttle almost day and night making clothes for the Confederate 
soldiers.
   Her home was near enough to the battlefield of Chickamauga for her to hear the muskery (sic).
When the firing ceased she gathered together such vehicles as the community and times 
afforded and went upon the battlefield and assisted in caring for the killed and wounded, many
of whom were her friends and neighbors.  She was among the first women to appear on the 
battlefield in their mission of mercy.
   In 1885 she and Judge Easterling came to Texas, where he died in 1887.  Mrs. Easterling 
remained in Athens until her death in 1910.
   This was the woman who planted the first flowers in Athens, when the public square was a
thicket.  The courageous woman who stood by her spinning wheel when the sounds of fierce
battle reached her ears, speaking of blood and death and anguish; the woman who deserted her 
post only when she could go out upon the battlefield itself and aid the dead and dying and wounded.
   It is this type of women that populated Texas
Transcribed by Bunny Freeman Nov. 2002

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