Bascomb Biggers

The Nankipooh Enquirer

Nankipooh, Georgia

Editor in Chief: Colonel Bascomb Biggers

Ace Reporter : Scoop Biggers

RE: "History"

My Great, Great Grandfather’s name was James Joseph Walton Biggers.  In 1828, when he was just a small boy of four years, his family moved from South Carolina to a small frontier town on the Chattahoochee River called Columbus, Georgia.  He spent the next sixteen years of his life growing up near the river and watching his father plow the hard, red Georgia clay in an effort to feed his family.  At the age of twenty, JJW Biggers struck out on his own, and started his own farm in Harris County, Georgia, near what is now Calloway Gardens, but in those days there was just Mulberry Grove, and a small village called Hamilton, Georgia.

During the period leading up to the Civil War his farming efforts prospered, and by the time of his death, he owned about two thousand acres in Harris County and about three hundred more in a little village north of Columbus called Nankipooh. After his death, his heirs received shares, but the farming continued under the direction of his son, Bascomb Biggers who was born a few years prior to the Civil War. During Bascomb's time Nankipooh consisted of five or six farms run by the families named Livingston, Walton, Moon, Adams, and Biggers.

Bascomb remained on the land until his death, at which time the properties were divided among his eight children. Three of those children spent their lives in Atlanta, while four remained on the land in Nankipooh, while the youngest, James Walton Biggers moved into Columbus and became a successful architect and designed many of the citiy’s most prominent buildings, including the Public Library.

The oldest son, James Norman Biggers continued the farming and married one of the Livingston girls from the farm across the road, whose name was Bessie Lee Livingston, and thus those two farms were united. By the 1950's James Norman Biggers also ran a store called Biggers Grocery at the intersection of Hamilton Road and Fortson Road which also intersected the Central of Georgia rail line connecting Columbus and Atlanta.

The Biggers family played a prominent role in settling Nankipooh and were part of the building of Nankipooh School and the Pierce Chapel Methodist Church a few miles north of the school. There are many stories concerning the origins of the name Nankipooh, The version which Norman Biggers (born 1885) believed to be true was that Nankipooh was a great chief of the Muscogee Indians who were a branch of the Cherokee living in the Chattahoochee Valley when the first white settlers arrived in the area and founded Columbus and later Nankipooh.

Norman Biggers Bentley

DATELINE JULY 4, 2010:
"Bascomb Biggers"

My name is Bascomb Biggers.

During my lifetime I saw quite a lot of history as I watched our country grow up. That included the Civil War, which is about as bad as it has ever got in this country. It looks like now though, that we are in some pretty hard times again, and I just can't hold my say any longer.

Here are a few things that remind me that no matter how hard times get, we are still lucky, and mighty beholden to the good Lord for looking out for us. When people ask me how I am, I say, "Better than I deserve, but not as good as I wanna be!" Which is a reminder to me that we all owe everything to the good Lord! But, here are a few of those things that I mentioned.

1. Hearing the bell rung to come in for dinner, after being in the field since sun up.
2. A cold dipper full of well water, after six hours out in the hot July Georgia sun.
3.The sound of caddie-dids up in the trees at sundown.
4.Watching the lightning bugs after dark.
5. Hearing that old bull frog down by the mill pond late in the evening.
6. Waking up in the morning to the rooster crow, and knowing there are fresh eggs, and homemade biscuits for breakfast.
7. Walking out to the fields with the fresh scent of Georgia Pine in my nostrils.

Something I ain't never liked: A politician standing on a tree stump making promises for votes, that you know he ain't never gonna keep!
"Now that's just the way I see it, and you can tell-em I said so".

Bascomb Biggers
07-04-2010