Karen Auman, "The Good Forest: The Salzburgers, Success, and the Plan for Georgia" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

Nov 20, 2025

Karen Auman, an assistant professor at BYU and genealogist, discusses her book, The Good Forest. She delves into the Salzburgers' unique journey as Georgia's early settlers who succeeded in forming a cohesive community against the odds. Auman reveals how their exile instilled a strong sense of identity and adherence to the trustees’ vision. The conversation explores the challenges posed by Georgia's environment and the Salzburgers' innovative economic efforts in cattle, lumber, and silk production, while also addressing the tragic decline of their settlement.

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INSIGHT

Salzburgers Challenge Georgia's 'Inevitable' Path

The Salzburgers complicate the standard narrative that Georgia only prospered after adopting slavery.
Their early success shows non-slave-based, charitable colonization could achieve self-sufficiency and cohesion.

ANECDOTE

Exile Defined Their Identity

The Salzburgers remembered exile from Salzburg as the defining trauma of their lives.
Losing children under 12 to Catholic re-education made migration an existential, not just material, choice.

INSIGHT

Trustee Plans vs. Local Adaptation

Trustees tried to control Georgia from London but often failed in practice on the ground.
Ebenezer adapted trustee plans locally, sharing scarce good soil rather than following rigid lot assignments.

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The Good Forest: The Salzburgers, Success, and the Plan for Georgia (U Georgia Press, 2024) explores some of Georgia’s earliest settlers, the Salzburgers.

Georgia, the last of Britain’s American mainland colonies, began with high aspirations to create a morally sound society based on small family farms with no enslaved workers. But those goals were not realized, and Georgia became a slave plantation society, following the Carolina model. This trajectory of failure is well known. But looking at the Salzburgers, who emigrated from Europe as part of the original plan, provides a very different story.

The Good Forest reveals the experiences of the Salzburger migrants who came to Georgia with the support of British and German philanthropy, where they achieved self-sufficiency in the Ebenezer settlement while following the Trustees’ plans. Because their settlement comprised a significant portion of Georgia’s early population, their experiences provide a corrective to our understanding of early Georgia and help reveal the possibilities in Atlantic colonization as they built a cohesive community.

The relative success of the Ebenezer settlement, furthermore, challenges the inherent environmental, cultural, and economic determinism that has dominated Georgia history. That well-worn narrative often implies (or even explicitly states) that only a slave-based plantation economy—as implemented after the Trustee era—could succeed. With this history, Auman illuminates the interwoven themes of Atlantic migrations, colonization, charity, and transatlantic religious networks.

Guest: Dr. Karen Auman is an assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University and a certified genealogist. She studies Germans during the colonial period in the Atlantic World, religion on the frontiers of America, migrations, and families.

Host: Lucy Smith Biemiller is an intended M.A. History student at the University of Georgia. She studies 18th and 19th material culture in the American South primarily as it relates to classical culture.

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