Alice Hughes didn’t do anything halfway.
In her 20s, she wanted to see Australia — so she boarded a freighter and spent three months traveling through Panama, Mexico and the Galapagos on her way.
“She believed in if you're going to do it, you’re going to do it the whole way,” said Vyvyan Hughes, Alice’s daughter. “And if she was going to learn something, she was going to know everything.”
Alice, who died from cancer on Dec. 15 at age 84, loved Oglethorpe County and its stories.
Alice’s funeral will be in January at the family’s cemetery in Gadsden, Alabama. Her memorial will be on Feb. 22 in Oglethorpe County.
Vyvyan helped Alice attend the launch party for Home Grown, The Echo’s home and garden magazine, on Dec. 11.
Originally from Gadsden, Alabama, Alice moved to Oglethorpe County 18 years ago from Walnut Grove in Walton County.
“She loved the house at Walnut Grove, but she was never home there,” Vyvyan said. “But here, she was home.”
She saw her move to Oglethorpe County — where her family ties date back to the American Revolution — as a homecoming.
Alice’s love for history and Oglethorpe County brought three historical markers to the county: Cloud’s Creek Baptist Church in 1999, Howard’s Covered Bridge in 2000 and the Birthplace of Columbia Theological Seminary in 2020.
“She wants people to know how communities come together, how churches come together, how markets, how these people in history and how you create a community,” Vyvyan said.
Historic Oglethorpe County awarded Alice the Historic Oglethorpe County Annual Award in 2023, in recognition of outstanding contributions to understanding Oglethorpe County’s history.
“When people know where they come from, and you can go there, it gives you a sense of who you are, a sense that there has been a world, and the whole reason that this happened, you are here,” said Vyvyan.
Her love for history brought her across the state — and later, to Cornwall, England — looking for records in old courthouses and churches.
She spent two months living in a thatched-roofed cottage in Cornwall, her husband’s ancestral home, researching, writing a book on the area’s history and befriending the locals.
“If you met my mom, she never stopped talking, and that’s how she got her stuff done,” Vyvyan said.
Alice traveled across Georgia with the Georgia Quilt Project, which documented over 8,000 quilts across the state between 1990-93.
During the 1996 Paralympics, she lived with the athletes — including the prince of Jordan — while working as an editor for the Paralympics newsletter.
“She was a storyteller — had a story for everything and would remember them,” Vyvyan said, who worked to record as many of Alice’s stories as possible.
Her love for stories brought her to serve on the Oglethorpe County Library Board of Trustees.
“She saved books and believed in books in the library,” Vyvyan said.
The past year, Alice worked to save the book “All Boys aren’t Blue” from attempts to remove it from the library.
“I think she realized what she did, but sometimes, I'm not sure if she really understands the impact of what she did,” Vyvyan said.