Winston Groom had strong family ties to Wilcox County, Alabama

I was saddened to hear that best-selling author Winston Groom – who had strong family ties to Wilcox County – passed away from a suspected heart attack last Thursday at his home in Fairhope. He was 77 years old.

Winston Groom.

Groom is best known for his best-selling novel, “Forrest Gump,” which was adapted into an Academy Award-winning movie starring Tom Hanks in 1994. Groom, a University of Alabama graduate who served a tour of duty in Vietnam with the Army’s Fourth Infantry Division, also won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1988 novel, “Gone the Sun.” Among his many other honors and awards, Groom received the 2011 Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer of the Year.

In addition to his famous fictional works, Groom also wrote a number of noteworthy nonfiction books, including books about Alabama football, World War I, World War II, the War of 1812 and the Civil War. One of his best Civil War books, “Vicksburg, 1863,” was published by Knopf Doubleday in 2010. It’s in this book that Groom wrote about his ancestral ties to Wilcox County.

In his introduction to “Vicksburg, 1863,” Groom remarked that in all of his earlier war histories, he’d had a close relative in the conflict and that he “found these direct links with the past particularly gratifying while writing the books.” He went on to say that he undertook the book about Vicksburg with a “little trepidation” because he knew of no family link between himself and the Civil War events there.

However, that all changed when Groom received an e-mail from a cousin who was an expert on Groom family history. This cousin told Groom that his family moved in the 1830s from Virginia and North Carolina to Wilcox County, “about a hundred miles up the Alabama River from Mobile, in the heart of the black belt, at that time the greatest cotton-growing region in the nation – maybe in the world.”

“There, in 1832, at a place named Snow Hill, was born one James Wright Groom, who would become my great-great-grandfather,” Groom wrote in his introduction. “In 1862, one year into the Civil War, he rode a short distance over to Meridian, Mississippi, and joined the Fourth Mississippi Cavalry Regiment – the so-called East Mississippi Dragoons. Why he chose to enlist in Mississippi instead of Alabama is anybody’s guess, but the records show that’s what he did.”

As fighting around Vicksburg intensified, the Fourth Mississippi was sent there to reinforce the Confederates that were already there defending the “Gibraltar of the Confederacy.” Groom said he’s not sure what role his second-great-grandfather played in all this, but no records show that he was captured or wounded. “From all indications, he never rose higher than a private, but the records show he wasn’t a deserter or a coward, and he fought on till the bitter end.”

After the war, James Wright Groom moved to Mobile, where he became a marine engineer. According to the May 31, 1906 edition of The Mobile Register, “he won a high standing in this profession and was one of the best-known engineers on the river.” The newspaper also noted that he was a “highly respected citizen of Mobile.”

In the end, Alabama has suffered a great loss with the death of Winston Groom, but he leaves behind a rich legacy of great books that will be enjoyed by generations to come. If you’ve never taken the time to read any of Groom’s books, I highly recommend that you do so. “Vicksburg, 1863” would be a good place to start.