Look & Listen - Eleanor Henderson

A look inside Eleanor’s three research trips to Georgia during the writing of The Twelve-Mile Straight.

A sketch of the yard on Eleanor's father's farm, by William Henderson.
Dirt road, Ben Hill County. Eleanor returned to South Georgia on a road trip with her father after many years away.
Eleanor's dad, William Henderson, on a roadside farm in South Georgia.
The Hendersons sharecropped this land in the 1930s, before tractors were common.
The rubble of the Hendersons' farmhouse.
Eleanor, eight months pregnant, on the land her grandparents farmed.
Eleanor's father on the Henderson family plot behind a rural church, including the graves of his parents, Willie B and Florence, and his brother, James, who died in a house fire.
The country crossroads store Eleanor's grandparents ran in the 1930s.
On her second trip to Georgia, Eleanor's son Henry crawls across the breezeway of a dog trot home in the Historic Village in the Georgia Museum of Agriculture in Tifton.
A gourd tree beside a cane field at the Georgia Museum of Agriculture. Gourd trees were common homes to purple martins, which were said to keep mosquitoes away.
The Georgia Historical Society in Savannah, where Eleanor spent an afternoon in the archives while a babysitter played with Henry in the park.
On her third trip to Georgia, Eleanor was on a research fellowship at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library at Emory University in Decatur.
The Margaret Mitchell House, where Eleanor's father lived as an architecture student at Georgia Tech.
A diorama of a dog trot at the Atlanta History Center, the kind of home Eleanor's family lived in on the farm.
Front porch of the Smith Family Farm at the Atlanta History Center.
The Smith Family Farm captures rural Georgia life in the 1860s.
The yard of the Smith Family Farm.
For more images, video, and music from Eleanor's research, visit her Pinterest board "Georgia on My Mind".