Dolly Lunt Burge Parks
1817 - 1891
Dolly Sumner Lunt was born in Bowdoinham, Maine. As a relative of Charles Sumner, she was brought up immersed in the abolitionist movement.
Dolly married Samuel Harding Brown Lewis (1816-1843). Their first child, Susan Littlefield Lewis, was born in 1840 in Bowdoinham, Maine. The young family moved to Georgia in 1842. Two years later, four-year-old Susan died of bronchitis while they were staying in Covington with Dolly's married sister in April 1844. Dolly had a second child, Orrington Lewis, born in 1843, but he died in infancy. Then later that same year, Dolly's husband died of congestive fever at the age of twenty-seven.
Dolly married Samuel Harding Brown Lewis (1816-1843). Their first child, Susan Littlefield Lewis, was born in 1840 in Bowdoinham, Maine. The young family moved to Georgia in 1842. Two years later, four-year-old Susan died of bronchitis while they were staying in Covington with Dolly's married sister in April 1844. Dolly had a second child, Orrington Lewis, born in 1843, but he died in infancy. Then later that same year, Dolly's husband died of congestive fever at the age of twenty-seven.
As a young widow, Dolly moved in with her sister in Covington and got a job teaching school. There, she met and married her second husband, Thomas Burge, a southern gentleman, widowed father of four, and owner of the Burge Plantation. They had one child, a daughter, Sadie, before Thomas Burge died in 1858 of tuberculosis, leaving Dolly to manage the plantation on her own in the days leading up to the Civil War.
Dolly was married for a third time in 1866 to a prominent Methodist minister and charter member of the Board of Trustees of Emory College, the Rev. William Parks. She moved to his home in Oxford while managing the Burge Plantation in absentia. She lived in Oxford until Parks’s death in 1873.
Dolly witnessed Sherman’s March to the Sea from her front porch and wrote about it in her journal. The Diary of Dolly Lunt Burge: 1848 – 1879 was published in its entirety in 1962. Excerpts of her diary concerning the Civil War had been previously published in A Woman’s Wartime Journal: An Account of Sherman’s Devastation of a Southern Plantation (1918). Another edition of the entire journal, based on new transcriptions from the original manuscript and relevant scholarship from the intervening decades, was published in 1997 by the University of Georgia Press.