Dolly Sumner Lunt

Born in Bowdoinham, Maine, in 1817, Dolly Sumner Lunt later moved south and taught school in Georgia. She is most often identified today through her diary and through the published volume A Woman’s Wartime Journal, drawn from her writings about life on a Georgia plantation and the passage of Sherman’s army in 1864.

Sources available during this search agree that she was a New Englander with ties to an abolitionist family background, yet she spent much of her adult life in Georgia after marrying into plantation life. That tension helps explain why her writing still draws interest: it records daily life, fear, loss, and the upheaval of war from inside the Confederate home front.

Her diaries, kept across many years, have become useful historical documents for readers interested in the Civil War, women’s writing, and the lived realities of the antebellum and wartime South. She died in 1891, and her work continues to be read both as a compelling personal record and as a revealing primary source shaped by the world she lived in.