Product of his Background

Reconstruction

written by Leo Brooks

The Union Army Generals worried that Georgia might decide to continue the war long after the rest of the South had surrendered.  So they took steps to prevent such action.  General Sherman and his Armies cut a wide path of destruction as he destroyed and burned everything in his path on his famous "March to the Sea".  It took Georgia close to one hundred years to recover.

Oliver Hardy returned home.  The family was broke, but while they still had their land, it was worthless.  Oliver married his childhood sweetheart Sarah Olive upon his return.  They, along with his father, Samuel, managed to eke out a living.  Sarah and her baby died during childbirth a couple years later.  In 1870, Oliver remarried and he and his wife, Cornelia, had three children, Lillian, George, and Mamie.  He also lost Cornelia during the birth of Mamie.  Life was a never ending struggle in rural Georgia.

Oliver farmed for a while, then when the Federal Government decided to rebuild the Southern Railroad (it had been destroyed by the war).  He got a job as a Supervisor of one of the construction crews.  This was a major improvement in his financial status.  In 1890, 54 year old Oliver, with three kids on his hands, married a widow by the name of Emmie Tant.  29 year old Emmie had four children of her own.  Her late husband, T. Sam Tant had worked on the railroad construction crews under Hardy.

Around 1890, Hardy took over the management of the Turnell-Butler Hotel at Madison, Georgia.  On January 18th, 1892, Emmie gave birth to a son, which they named Norvell Hardy.  Ten months later, Oliver Hardy passed away on November 22, 1892.

This is a good place to stop our story for now.  ...

I have only covered the major highlights of the two families.  I have more than enough information to write a book on this part of the family history alone.  In doing my research, I am afraid I ended up debunking all of the families' favorite stores of their past.  The Norvells had long boasted that the Norvell Pew at the Bruton Parish Church at Williamsburg, Virginia, was directly behind that of George Washington and his family.  It ended up the other way around.  The Norvells were part of the elite of Williamsburg, while George was just a common Virginia planter at the time, so the Norvells sat at the front of the church and poor George and his family did not rate a private pew, and had to sit at the back of the church with the rest of the common folks.

Like all families, there are skeletons in the Hardys' and Norvells' closets and since it serves no purpose except to possibly embarrass those members of the families that are still living, I have left the skeletons in the closets where they belong.  Babe was told very little about the rich history of the Hardy family, and really very little about the Norvells, so it is no wonder that he made up his own stories about the family.