Because along its southernmost border lay an inexplicable depression called the Devil’s Footprint and others Pasco Holler, and all agreed was haunted. For proof they needed only regard their own history: Bragg’s caravan lost there for days like a schooner listless, adrift without anchor or sail—while his missus, gripped in a stupor by the nameless illness that befell her, the old folk claimed, the very second the very first Pasco tree dropped shadow on them—lay wasting away in the carriage, quarantined from even her three young sons, giving up the ghost just as they escaped the cruciferous canopy that had played day for night the better part of a week. Murmurs about a curse, a murder, a lone Indian left behind to guard the wood, an enchanted elm, but these were never mentioned out loud. The widower’s gray face case doubt on all unfavorable speculation. Himself sick with grief, Bragg ventured little farther than the hill beyond that tree line. There where the Oconee forked in sight of the Holler, he laid his wife to rest in the center of what would become known as Braggsville, the city that love built in the heart of Georgia.
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