Joseph Maddock was an enthusiastic promoter and had many friends in the Northeast who spread the word about the availability of land in Georgia. More Quakers moved into the Wrightsborough area, so that within two years of Maddock’s arrival there were almost one hundred families in the congregation. Now that the town was established, a larger portion of the new arrivals either decided not to farm or could not acquire suitable land, but they were quickly absorbed into the community if they had skills as blacksmiths, tanners, saddlers, shoemakers, or merchants, or were willing to work for hire. The moving water of the creeks provided the only power to be harnessed other than from draft animals. An invaluable service was provided by a sawmill, which substituted a waterwheel and a gear-driven saw blade for the backbreaking effort of two men who would cut boards by pulling an eight-foot-long ripping saw back and forth.

Ethan visited Wrightsborough as rarely as possible, usually just to trade his chairs and farm products for needed supplies. He and the Quaker leader had never again mentioned their altercation during the trip southward, and Ethan took corn and wheat to Maddock’s mill, where he and the miller were polite to each other. On one visit there he noticed a slender young man wading in the creek, scooping up dirt and sediment from the bottom in a shallow pan, then examining it closely. As he bent over, totally absorbed, his long black hair fell forward in front of his eyes, so that Ethan wondered why he didn’t tie it back in a pigtail. It was a bright late-winter day, warmer than usual, but still too cold to be in the water, and after watching for a few minutes, Ethan asked, “You found any color?”

The young man looked up, smiled, and said, “Hello. I’m not panning for gold, but analyzing the crustaceans that live here.”

Ethan was intrigued. “For what?”

“I’m hoping to identify and list all the living things of this area, both plants and animals.”

“How do you know what they are?”

It seemed that the man wanted to talk. “Oh, I have a few books that describe what grows in Europe, and if I can’t find them I just write down what they look like or draw a picture. Until I left Philadelphia last fall, I shared this kind of information with a man named John Bartram, who is the king’s botanist in the colonies. His son is living on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina and plans to come to Georgia next year. I have suggested that he visit here in Wrightsborough.”