The Buzzard Roost landing trail ran west from the Ocmulgee through the long pines of Houston County, and in the autumn of 1832 the Bryan wagons came down it loaded with their possessions.

They had been in Houston County since at least 1830 — the census put them there, in the log house James had built but did not own the property. It was comfortable enough, larger than most on that frontier, close enough to the new home that the boys could have walked to the cleared ground and watched the house going up. Robert was six, Troup was four, Hugh was two, and Catharine was carrying their fourth. By the time the wagons rolled west they had been watching it for four years. Now it was finished. It was a sight to see.

Catharine stepped down from the wagon; she knew it was hers. Up the front steps and onto the porch, six stout white columns anchoring the structure to the ground, the roof throwing shade across the full width of the facade. The dinner bell stood out back, centered in the hallway’s view. Every board was smooth-cut and sanded, the finest in materials. The smell of fresh-cut cedar filled the warm air, the siding and the trim built to last a lifetime, probably more. Wainscoting and faux bois trim inside, as elegant a house as she could imagine.

Cornelius arrived that same year. Then Nancy, then Abner, then Catharine Penelope, then James, then Honora. The house absorbed them room by room and season by season, the place and the people making each other into what they would become.

James kept his office in the right front parlor. Two windows centered the fireplace, looking out toward the southern fields. A door opened directly onto the porch so that men coming to see him on business could come straight in without disturbing the household. A formal room. A working room.

On a working morning the porch door stood open. The sounds came in with the air — the fields and the smokehouse and the kitchen, the full running sound of a plantation in operation. He was a man with a great deal of work to do and he did it from that room. The survey lines of Perry and the creek that fed the Houston Factory, the dam site he had been calculating for months, the letter to Milledgeville about the session. The carriage waiting in the yard. He and Catharine would make the road north to the capital in it — a fine enclosed carriage, the finest she had ever ridden in, the kind of carriage that told a Georgia road what sort of man was on it. The Milledgeville papers would note their arrival. Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Bryan, Houston County.

The children kept coming. On summer evenings the porch held them all — the little ones chasing fireflies into the yard, the older ones finding their places along the rail, the day cooling at last after the long Georgia heat. The plantation settling into the dark around them.

It was early spring when James died. A Monday. March 22, 1847; forty-five years old. It must have been unexpected — Robert was in Cincinnati, twenty years old, having just graduated first in his medical class, a faculty teaching career ahead of him that he would never begin. In the parlor where James had conducted the business of a county and a plantation, lay his body, the candles burning and the mirrors draped with cloth, a tradition. The children said goodbye to their father whose voice had filled these rooms. Catharine stood with the eight, the younger ones clinging to her skirt, the tenth about to come whether the world was ready or not.

Catharine chose the ground herself. Four hundred feet south of the house, close enough that the family would always be within sight of it, and it within sight of them. The office door stood open. No clients came. The fields were there. The work was still there.

Laura came on May 2nd — born into everything he had built and never knowing the man who built it. She was the one thing in that spring that was entirely new. The grief and the new life in the same house, the same season, neither one waiting on the other.

Robert came home to a plantation that had not stopped.