Macon "Telegraph," Feb., 1917
By James Callaway
I received a letter from Mr. Alfred C. Newell concerning a memorial to the memory of Col. John P. Fort. The letter in part reads:
"I note that John P. Fort, of Mount Airy, is dead. I write you this because it seems to me a movement should be initiated by some one to establish a memorial to this great man. He would not want a monument. He would be the last man in the world to care for anything like display. It seems to me, however, entirely fitting that a special appropriation could be made by the board of county commissioners of every county in south Georgia to the end that a small mountain school might be established somewhere about his beloved Mount Airy.
"What William H. Crawford, Charles F. Crisp, and Alfred H. Colquitt were to Georgia in a public sense; what Sidney Lanier and Joel Chandler Harris were to the State in a literary way; and what Henry Grady was as an editor-statesman, John P. Fort has been to Georgia as the practical scientist.
"In other words, his name deserves to be perpetuated in the immediate set of the biggest men in the State's history.
"I don't think I am going too far when I say that he probably did more for Georgia in a practical way than any other one man. I have a long letter from him which he wrote some years ago telling me how he first came to think of drilling the original artesian well on his place near Albany. This was in 1881. You know, of course, the transformation which followed in this section.
"It was through his efforts that the apple culture was introduced in the north Georgia mountains.
"He was a dreamer who dreamed dreams as well as a scientist who knew how to work out these dreams with a table of logarithms.
"His father before him was a great man, old Dr. Tomlinson Fort—the greatest antebellum physician of his day."