A Heritage of Mobility

Photo courtesy Cy Crumley

It’s not a short drive from Florida to Tennessee, and with the price of gas nowadays, it isn’t a cheap trip, either.

That’s today. Can you imagine the limits to travel a hundred years ago? And yet, my relatives didn’t seem to find that to be much of a barrier to relocation.

Remember my great-grandmother, Sarah Ann Broyles McClellan—the one I mentioned a couple days ago? The McClellan homestead was in northern Florida. Though their hometown of Wellborn itself is tiny, and though it’s been many years since the family lived there, their legacy can still be seen in the lake and cemetery that each bear their surname.

But Sarah Ann wasn’t from Wellborn. She wasn’t even from Florida. She was from Tennessee.

And the family’s travels didn’t stop there. Sarah Ann was raised in Tennessee, but her father was from South Carolina, and her mother was from Georgia. And well over 100 years before that, her Broyles forebears braved the trip across the Atlantic from their ancestral home somewhere in Germany.

And I can’t even stomach the cost of a trip across town!