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| Robert Hicks | |
Robert Hicks, author of the blockbuster The Widow of the South, which helped finance his passion of buying and saving a Civil War battlefield in Franklin, Tenn., died on March 4. He was 71.
Published in 2005, The Widow of the South was Hicks's first novel and was, the New York Times wrote, "one of the buzziest books of the year, with his publisher, Warner Books, ordering 250,000 copies for its first print run."
The Widow of the South told the story of Carrie McGavock, who with her husband owned Carnton, a mansion that served as a Civil War hospital, which Hicks had helped restore. The novel "imagines a love story involving her and a Confederate soldier." The book also helped popularize Carnton: visits quadrupled, "and over the next decade Franklin transformed from a sleepy Nashville suburb to a luxury enclave, a change due at least partly to the book's success."
"He was a poet for people whose voices were stilled years ago," Eric Jacobson, the head of the Battle of Franklin Trust, which manages Carnton and other sites, told the Times. "He gave voice to people who died decades ago who sadly had been forgotten."
Hicks also published two other novels, A Separate Country (2009) and The Orphan Mother (2016).
Hicks was accomplished in an array of fields, the Times noted, "including as a music publisher, an expert in 19th-century Southern furniture--Art & Antiques magazine named him one of the country's top 100 collectors for seven years in a row--and as a leading force in historic preservation around Nashville."
After helping restore Carnton, he decided to buy a golf course on the site of the Battle of Franklin that was for sale to keep the area from being developed.
As the Times recounted, "He reached out to civic groups, politicians, developers, country music stars, Black activists and other preservationists, selling them on the idea that reclaiming the site's history was an opportunity to put Franklin at the center of a new, difficult conversation about America's past."
He helped raise nearly $20 million to buy some 110 acres and turn it into a park. The result was what the National Park Service called "the largest battlefield reclamation in North American history."