John Azor Kellogg wrote a memoir of the time he spent with the people of north Georgia that his family published after his death. He was born in Bethany, Pennsylvania on March 16, 1828,
he moved with his family to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin around 1840. When the war began, Kellogg joined the Sixth Wisconsin Infantry as a first lieutenant and participated in all of the
major battles of the eastern campaigns. His tale began with his capture in Virginia on May 5, 1864. Over the next six months, he participated in attempts to escape from the Rebel prisons in Danville, Macon, and Charleston. On October 5, 1864, he, along with Captain John Vliet, Captain Henry Spencer, Lieutenant James N. Goff, and Lieutenant William S. Hatcher jumped from train cars to freedom. From near Columbia, South Carolina, Kellogg’s party traveled at night across South Carolina and northeast Georgia before arriving near where their two crude maps and a compass led them to believe they might find Sherman’s armies.
By late October 1864, Vliet and Goff had disappeared. Kellogg and his remaining companions found themselves in a quiet settlement with a store, a blacksmith shop, a few houses, and a barking dog. Standing on Spencer's shoulders, Kellogg lit a match to read the road signs. From the best that they could determine, they were then still more than forty miles from where the federal lines might be. They were in today’s Tate community. Kellogg and his companions did not go much further. Around midnight, Hatcher broke down. With the strain of hiding, walking, the cold, and starvation, Hatcher had simply reached his limit. They camped out in the woods. The next mourning, the fugitives continued on northwest, not knowing that they were moving towards danger. Desperate to quickly cover the last miles to the federal lines, they risked traveling in daylight. Somewhere near Jasper, Georgia, they encountered what they presumed to be a white man with a long rifle and dressed in a gray. A tree had partially concealed this man, quite likely a rebel sentry. Unable to escape, the Yankees advanced with an idea of jumping this guard. However, the man turned out to be a slave returning from a successful raccoon hunt. The slave took Kellogg and his two fellow fugitives to the log home of a sympathetic woman. Along the way, they suddenly met a dozen mounted and armed men dressed in gray homespun, horsemen whom they assumed must be Confederates. To their relief, in fact, they had found the unionists.
There they met David Steward McCravey (1830-1912) who, in 1864, had resigned his commission as first lieutenant in company I of the Thirty-sixth Georgia Confederate infantry to serve as the newly elected sheriff of Pickens County. McCravey and his neighbors had also formed a pro Union guerrilla company.
McCravey told Kellogg that frequently the local Confederate home guard savagely mutilated Union sympathizers before hanging them. Kellogg could hardly believe that such murders took place in a Christian land. He would remember that each member of the home guard carried a rifle strapped to his back, even while digging sweet potatoes. Armed with carbines, pistols, shotguns, and anything else that would shoot, McCravey’s some 100 draft evaders and Confederate deserters hid out. They had raided one two low country plantations for horses and provisions.
Kellogg’s time in October 1864 in Pickens County gives us a window on life in north Georgia at that time. He found his home spun clothed hosts as crude and uneducated. They had never seen anything like his compass and were thoroughly amazed by it. During his stay, Kellogg attended a wedding. The ceremony took place in a square log pen of some sixteen feet to a side, with a fire place nearly across one end and a bed on the other side. The cabin had a door and, on the opposite side, its only window. For furniture, the little house had a rough pine table and a few chairs. Kellogg described the groom from an Ohio regiment who had deserted after being abused by his captain. He had joined the Pickens County home guard and, within a month, found himself engaged to a local belle. Mary, the full figured bride, wore little more than a bright calico dress, leather shoes, and stockings. In her hair, she wore her only adornment, a horn comb. Her fiancée wore a simple white shirt, with pants and jacket of simple homespun.
The following night, in a rain storm, the major, with ten men and the Yankee fugitives, reached a safe house within five miles of the federal lines. The next morning, October 26, 1864, they passed into safety. Their two lost friends had arrived safely on October 29, they reported to General Edward Moody McCook. The latter arranged for a squadron of cavalry to escort a wagon load of supplies to McCravey. John A. Kellogg received the rank of colonel in November 1864 and, as such, commanded the Iron Brigade in its last battles and at Appomattox. Back in Wisconsin, he held government positions, practiced law, and served in the state senate before his death on February 10, 1883, at age fifty-five.
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