Nankipooh The Biggers Family (From The Nankipooh Enquirer)
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 little village named Hamilton.
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, Bascome Biggers who was born a view years prior to the Civil War. During Bascome’s time Nankipooh consisted of five or six farms run by the families named Livingston, Walton, Moon, Adams, and Biggers. Bascome 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 cities 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
https://www.facebook.com/bascombbiggers
bascombbiggers@bellsouth.net
This article can be viewed at the blogsite :
http://scoopbiggers.blogspot.com/ - or
http://thenankipoohenquirer.blogspot.com/
