Bettie Sellers

My Earliest American Ancestor

On 22, May, 1650, my earliest American ancestor was one of 107 persons established on a grant of 5350 acres north side of the Rappahannock river. By the 1704-5 rolls of Abingdon Parish, that John Mixon was credited with 400 acres of Virginia land.

In 1716 George Mixon (born Virginia ca. 1702) received a land grant of 200 acres located on Alligator River. By 1738 he was buying 600 acres of land on Pamlico River in Beaufort, N.C. for a consideration of 212 pounds, 12 shillings. When George died in 1779, his last will and testament gave to his son Zedekiah all land (450 acres) south side Pamlico River. Zedekiah Mixon was my great-great-great grandfather.

By the 19th Century, parts of that family had moved into the hills and valleys of Georgia. My grandfather Roland farmed near Palmetto, Georgia, south of Atlanta, and his many sons moved out across the rolling hills of Middle Georgia.

The day my father died, he followed his beagles in a rabbit run across the pastures sloping green down to the Flint River, drove ten miles into Griffin for a salt block for his cows, and standing in the kitchen near noon, reached toward the mantel over the fireplace for his county newspaper, and died there on his land.

I, Bettie Cosby Mixon Sellers, spent the first seventeen years of my life on that land of Middle Georgia. Oldest of five, I drew sweet water from a proud well that never ran dry even in the fiercest of summers, helped Mama with the younger children, while my brother two years younger followed Dad to fields of cotton and corn almost from the time when he took his first step. Today he lives on nearby acres, having raised pigs and cattle for many years.

It was not an easy life but a rich one for a child to grow up in. Shoal Creek ran, lively with snakes and minnows through the first farm (some eight miles east of Flint River) and Dad bought the second one about the time I left home. On that first little farm we built dams and playhouses, climbed pines and poplars, and stuck our inquisitive noses into the haunts of water snakes, wasps, and bees. Inheriting my love for words and stories from my teacher mother, I recited “The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat” to the pigs in the pasture when nobody else had time to listen, and read a thousand books perched in the branches of a tall poplar that spread its shade over the creek.

As life has arranged itself, I have spent forty years living on the side of a mountain in North Georgia near where my great-grandfather Seale rode on horseback or buggy to spread the Methodist gospel to a circuit of small congregations around the Nacoochee Valley. This too is a part of the heritage that ties me irrevocably to the land of my forefathers. I taught English at a small Methodist college for thirty-one years and wrote of and on the land—of its farmers, preachers, teachers, its women who bore children and fed them from kitchen gardens and small clumps of fruit trees that furnished Grandmother Mixon with small knotty peaches for a thousand jars of winter fruit. Here, on the land, I will die—a continuing part of more than 300 years of men and women who have loved the land.