John Porter Fort

Born in Milledgeville, Georgia, in 1841, John Porter Fort served in the Confederacy during the Civil War and later built a varied career as a lawyer, grower, and public-minded experimenter. Accounts of his life describe him as a "practical scientist" as well as a man deeply involved in Georgia's agricultural development.

He was especially noted for advocating and proving that parts of south Georgia sat over a major artesian water basin, work that helped make deep-well drilling important in the region. He was also associated with orchard and fruit-growing work in both north and southwest Georgia, and later received recognition from the University of Georgia for his contributions in horticultural and agricultural interests.

Fort died in 1917 in Tampa, Florida. The memoir published soon after his death preserves both his own recollections and the way family and contemporaries remembered him, making his writing valuable not just as autobiography, but as a window into Georgia life after the Civil War.