by Bowen Craig

Lee Epting is freaking awesome.  

I went out to interview him for a different outlet, planning inside my head on staying for twenty minutes max.  Two-and-a-half hours later I had to pry myself away.  If you love history, talk to Lee.  If you want to learn how to preserve history, talk to Lee.  Hell, if you want to learn how to teach kids to love history, I think you know what my advice is going to be.  When I finally just had to call the conversation, we went upstairs and perused an Athens Banner from the 1860’s.  Man, newspapers were just so much MORE than our pale, modern Internet equivalent: ads you actually want to read from your neighbors’ businesses, estate sales, mules for rent, some national news and some local.  The Internet barely reaches up to the ankles of the newspaper…if both were anthropomorphized into one really tall person and one really short one. 

Epting is the leading light for historic preservation ‘round these here parts.  Not only is it his passion, but he practices what he preaches.  He lives and maintains “The Hill,” Athens historic neighborhood.  Oh, and if it weren’t for him, there would be no more Taylor-Grady house.  He formed a non-profit, Landmark Commons, and then set about using it to not only saving the house, but to open it up for events, for weddings, get-togethers, in the process broadening what we think of as history.  The local representative of that ever-expanding history is Miss Aggie (Aggie Mills).

Miss Aggie was a slave…an incredibly intelligent woman…literate when it was patently illegal for her to be so…and she all-but ran multiple households…oh, and she made sure her offspring were college-educated in the 1860’s. A recently emancipated black woman in the 1860’s ensuring her children had a leg up in life that almost no one, of any race, did at that point? Dear Lord, that’s impressive. Her letters to the “Lady of the House” have been preserved, and tell a tale, a tale we haven’t been able to read, even in this supposedly enlightened age of ours.  Her post-emancipation writing is even more impressive (Sadly she had to “code switch,” as a matter of survival.).  Her marriage to Isaac, her travels, and her dedication to everyone (Yes, to her masters, but to their babies she raised even more than they did, and to her own children) cannot fail to impress.