The Briggs Family

Edgar Briggs was born around 1837 in Virginia and left it at twenty, newly married, chasing the gold that everyone else was chasing. He found some — enough to give him something more useful than legend: a permanent home and sawing equipment. The Hartwell Timber Co. hired him as saw hand and camp medic — partly, the record admits, so Hartwell could absorb a potential rival — and by 1889 he was foreman of the sawmill. He and Sara Mae raised eight children in Briarmont, the youngest of them Holt.

Holt carried the family's practical gifts into the town's next era: admitted to the Oakridge Institute in 1919 on the strength of a surveying examination, working the harbour docks at night, pulled alive from under a lightning-struck tree in the Season of Storms — and, the following spring, the first of the three co-founders of Alpha Chi Epsilon. Edgar lived to see it: he died around 1920 at eighty-three, at home and surrounded by family — an unusually gentle end for a founding-era man.