1) Lewis's childhood and home in Georgia

At age 5 yrs, Meriwether Lewis's father was killed in a Winter river crossing on horseback. His father, a military soldier at the time, fell from his horse into icy waters and died from pneumonia a few days later. Only six months later, Lewis's mother remarried a second cousin, John Marks, a wealthy plantation owner from Georgia. At age five, Lewis and his mother traveled by horse and wagon from Ivy, Virginia to Goose Pond, Georgia to resettle to a very remote plantation south of today's Elberton, Georgia (40 miles east of the University of Georgia).