By PAT NEWMAN
pnewman@thecitizennews.com

A grave marker commemorating one of Fayette County's earliest landowners was set in place Wednesday behind a cluster of shaded Peachtree City homes off Golfview Drive.

Janet Mack, president of the Fayette County Historical Society, and Eddy Lanham, an active society member whose hobby is securing and setting headstones on soldier's graves from the Revolutionary, Civil, 1812 and Indian Wars, led the procession of onlookers through the underbrush to the above-ground crypt which bore the remains of George Washington Ware, who served as a Sgt. Major in the Georgia Mounted Volunteers, 5th Battalion, during the Florida Indian Wars of 1836.

Ware has been dead for 151 years and his grave site is surrounded by almost a dozen stones which mark the final resting places for likely family members or workers associated with him.

According to Mack, who is an assistant professor of history at Georgia Military College in Union City, Ware paid $300 on Nov. 4, 1823 for the 202-plus acres where he is laid to rest and what today makes up Golf View, Rolling Green and a portion of Pinegate subdivisions.

Ware was a surveyor by trade and after acquiring additional landholdings in what is now Peachtree City, he established a grist mill known as Tinsley's Mill.