Old black and white photo of head and shoulders of Sidney Lanier.

Sidney Lanier (circa 1875), age 35.

As an elementary school student, my siblings and I stood staring from the dock across the waters of a quiet cove on the Murrayville northern tip of Lake Sidney Lanier.  My grandfather, William C. “Bud” Crane was a man of many hobbies, interests and projects. He didn’t finish all of the projects, but you had to admire the ambition.

In this instance, Grampa Bud was baiting the hook of my first fishing line to dip into the lake and the mouths of waiting bream as he told us of the Chestatee and Chattahoochee rivers meeting to form what man had made into Lake Sidney Lanier (with an assist from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers). Bud was finishing a lake cabin and dock of his own design and construction on a secluded cove at the northern end of Lake Lanier.

Our “other” usual family vacation spot was Jekyll Island, which my grandparents, Mary and Bud Crane can also claim credit for introducing us to. And to access Jekyll, you crossed the Sidney Lanier Bridge along U.S. Highway 17, connecting Brunswick, Ga. and the mainland, along with a causeway to Jekyll Island. I was told, then and now, it is the longest bridge span in Georgia. Who was this fellow named Sidney Lanier?

Decades later the start of my own career would land me in Macon, Ga., with well known CBS affiliate, WMAZ-TV 13, and Eyewitness News. And there again, the birth home and a museum named for famed musician, author and poet, Sidney Lanier.

He was educated nearby in Milledgeville, then the location of Oglethorpe University. Lanier served during the Civil War as a Confederate private, in the Confederate Signal Corps, and in the tidewater region of Virginia.  The ship on which he served was captured in 1864, and Lanier served as a prisoner of war at Point Lookout in Maryland. He contracted tuberculosis in the POW camp and suffered greatly from the disease for the rest of his life.

After a time in Alabama near Montgomery, Lanier became a lawyer and returned home to Macon. Though well regarded, Lanier long struggled to support his wife and three children. Failed careers as a flutist and musician were supplanted by poetry he would write for magazines and periodicals of the day. “The Marshes of Glynn” and “The Song of the Chattahoochee” are considered among his greatest works.  Though he lived only 39 years, Lanier left us quite a legacy.

In more recent times, due to Lanier’s brief stint in the Confederacy, there was talk, primarily emanating from Washington, D.C., of renaming the great lake, that bridge, schools and other honors paid to the poet and wordsmith.  Lanier was not a general, nor an elected official, he was but a lowly private, called to duty and fighting on behalf of his family, for his homeland. Thankfully, that prattle did not last long.

I am grateful, as my own grandsons approach the age of their first fishing pole, or walk on the beaches of Georgia’s Golden Isles, I can still look forward to telling them of a man who lived less than 40 years, yet has Georgia’s largest lake, longest bridge and much else named in his honor, despite rising from the humblest of backgrounds.

Photo: courtesy Libraries of Johns Hopkins University