A beautiful surprise crossed my email today, a post about our grandfather’s family homestead — a place, quite honestly, I hadn’t thought of in years. Yet today there it was, with old black-and-white images staring me in the face…offering tiny glimpses into the log cabin where Forrest C. Brooks (“Papa”) was raised in a family of seven sons. Kolb Farm was restored in the 1960s to preserve the history of The Battle of Kolb’s Farm, which took place during the American Civil War. It is on the National Register of Historic Places as part of Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park.
“Kolb-Brooks Farm”
Peter Valentine Kolb built this log house in 1836 as four rooms with an open dogtrot (huge by 1836 pioneer standards!), enclosing the dogtrot into a central hall sometime before the Civil War. William Franklin Brooks (1864-1952) and Emma Latimer Brooks (1865-1949) purchased it from the Kolb family and had seven boys (William, Jr., George, Clyde, Glen, Grover, Guy, and Forrest) that lived and grew up on this farm.
