John Gary Anderson and his Maverick Motor Company by J. Edward Lee

John Gary Anderson and his Maverick Motor Company by J. Edward Lee

Author:J. Edward Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-16T16:00:00+00:00


This collage features the “hungry visionary” from childhood (upper left) to middle age (center).

John Gary Anderson was a member of this generation. Born on November 27, 1861, in Lawsonville, North Carolina, Anderson was briefly tied to the Old South, dominated by the precious cotton and the forced labor required to cultivate that crop. Within eighteen months, however, the Confederacy had lost the talented General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson (at the May 1863 battle of Chancellorsville) and suffered simultaneous defeats that July at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. The latter battle split the South into two parts, separated by the Mississippi River. There would be no independence. There would be no foreign recognition. There would be no agricultural paradise. The tide was receding. Rather, there would be a wide swath of charred land stretching from Atlanta to Raleigh. Columbia, the citadel of the Deep South, was laid to waste by an inferno that could be seen fifty miles away. 4

Thus, John Gary Anderson was born during the worst of times. There were no “best of times.” His early years—spent in Lawsonville and with relatives in Landsford along South Carolina’s Catawba River—coincided with the death of the Old South. Before he was four years of age, his homeland had collapsed amid its cotton, smothered by the North’s industrial might, strangled by Union generals like Ulysses S. Grant and Sherman. Its leaders had become discredited (James Longstreet at Gettysburg) or were dead (Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart). Even the great commander Robert E. Lee had become militarily impotent, surrendering to Grant in April 1865 at Appomattox Court House. 5

Anderson was, as his grandson James C. Hardin Jr. succinctly explained, “hungry.” It was—in the tumultuous 1860s—impossible to be otherwise in the Southland. Among the parched fields of the dying Old South, hunger was literal, figurative and psychological. This hunger motivated the young boy, creating in him an insatiable drive to succeed. It would remain with him all of his life. He was determined, even as a child, to rise from the ashes of the discredited Old South and lead the way to something better. His childhood poverty, his modest three and one half months of formal schooling, the deaths of both parents as the result of tuberculosis, the utter dissolution of the South—none of these obstacles would derail his ambition. He was a hungry visionary, realizing that intelligence comes from more than a classroom experience. Success, hard work and bold dreams are interwoven. And in 1880 John Gary Anderson, not yet out of his teens, would arrive in the railroad village of Rock Hill, South Carolina, with visions—dreams—of contributing to a New South. 6



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