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The Eponymous Mr. Prince
Little Din You Know The Fame Ani> Accomplishments Of
The Man For Whom The
Avenue Was Named
A n e P° n y m ' dictionary tells us, is a
i\ I I name formed from the name of a person
to designate a place, and an eponymous person is
someone for whom a place has been named.
Prince Avenue, the wide Athens street which
stretches west almost exactly two miles from
Pulaski Street to the Jefferson Road, is an
eponym. Described as "once one of the nation's
finest boulevards" by Frances Taliaferro Thomas in
her excellent book A Portrait of Historic Athens and
Clarke County (1992), but now dotted with profes
sional buildings, fast food businesses, and parking
lots, Prince Avenue was named after a renowned
Georgian, now nearly forgotten, who lived in
Athens for less than two years. This man, Oliver
Hillhouse Prince, may, therefore, appropriately be
called the eponymous Mr. Prince.
Oliver Hillhouse Prince was a transplanted
Connecticut Yankee who became such a great
Georgian that Men of Mark in Georgia (1974
reprint), an elaborate, multi-volume history of
this state, rightfully labels him "one of the bril
liant figures in Georgia in the first half of the
nineteenth century."
"Mr. Prince, * a Georgia newspaper wrote in 5
1913, " was one of that splendid galaxy of men 5
who came equipped with education and inspired £
by ambition and patriotism from New England ”
and the Middle States to Georgia and in deed
'illustrated' Georgia, as much as did her native
sons."
Oliver H. Prince has been justly called "a man
of many talents" and "something of a renaissance
man." He was a U.S. Senator. He was a newspaper
edicor, a journalist and a story writer. He was the
author of a hjmorous sketch brazenly plagiarized
by a distinguished English novelist. He was a
highly respected lawyer. He wrote a law book that
became a Georgia legal classic. He was instru
mental in bringing railroads to Georgia. He even
laid out the streets of one of Georgia's major
cities.
Prince died at age 55, a victim of what Lucian
Lamar Knight, in his Georgia's Landmarks,
Memorials, and Legends (1914), calls "one of the
saddest catastrophes in the history of the State."
He had the enormous misfortune to board a ship
which unknowingly sailed into the middle of what
historian Jay Barnes describes as "one of the most
infamous hurricanes of the nineteenth century."
Prince was bom on July 31, 1782 in Montville,
Connecticut, about 40 miles from New Haven. In
1796, when he was 14 years old, he moved with
his family to Washington, Georgia, the county
seat of Wilkes County, where he would live for the
noct 26 years. In 1790, Wilkes county was the
largest county in Georgia, and about half the
state's population lived in Wilkes County and the
surrounding area.
Although he was well educated and widely
read. Prince received very little formal schooling.
From 1803 until 1806 he was an assistant editor
of The Monitor, a Wilkes county newspaper. In
1806 he was admitted to the bar and beganra
career as an attorney. For the next 16 years he
rode circuit with the judges and other lawyers of
the Northern Circuit traveling from county to
county on horseback to try cases in log cabins
and other makeshift courtrooms. When the day's
legal work was done, Prince and his colleagues
traveling the circuit would sit around a crackling
fire at night and gossip, tell jokes, and exchange
stories. Prince's storytelling was so entertaining
that he soon "acquired a reputation for the bril
liance of his refined, classically turned wit,"
according to Virginia King Nirenstein in her
inspiring book With Kindly Voices (1984), half of
which is devoted to a biography of Prince.
"[Prince's] sense of humor," Men of Mark in
Georgia tells us," is said by contemporaries to
have been coupled with great kindness of heart,
which made him not only a delightful companion,
but a most popular man."
In 1813 Prince rode on horseback to
Connecticut to visit his mother, who had moved
back to her home state. In 1817 he married 18-
year old Mary Ross Norman, of Lincoln County. In
his book Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of
Upper Georgia (1855), Georgia Gov. George Gilmer,
who was a close friend of the Princes, remembered
Mrs. Prince as "a very pretty and exceedingly ami
able woman," and the marriage was a love match
that endured.
In 1822 the couple's two young children died,
and, perhaps out of grief, the Princes moved to
newly created Bibb County.
While living in Bibb County, the Princes had
three more children, one son and two daughters.
Prince v daughter Virginia, born in 1825, was his
favorite child, and his last recorded words on
earth were for her.
In early 1823 Oliver Prince was one of five
commissioners who selected the site, and actually
drew the plat, of the city of Macon. As an old
Macon newspaper column says: "It was to Oliver
Hillhouse Prince's wisdom and foresight that
Macon owes her wide streets." In March 1823,
Prince bought a piece of land at Fifth and Plum
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S3 FLAGPOLE AUGUST 30, 2000