Civil War veteran and father of the legendary comedian Oliver Norvell Hardy. He was the son of a farmer who owned thirteen acres of land and nine slaves, and descended from English stock. When the Civil War began in 1861, young Oliver was one of the local farmers in Columbia County who rallied to defend their way of life. He enlisted in Company K, 16th Georgia Infantry, rising from Private to Sergeant, and eventually fighting in sixteen battles during the course of the war. He was wounded during the Battle of Antietam in Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862. At the end of the war, he was among less than half of the original Columbia County soldiers who returned home. Soon thereafter, he married his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Olive. Several years later, she died in childbirth with their first child. In 1870, Hardy remarried to Cornelia Magruder, the sister of two of his fallen comrades. They went on to have three children together, Lillian, George, and Mamie. He did very well for himself during the post-war years, becoming a tax collector, a politician, and a supervisor on one of the construction crews rebuilding the Southern Railroad, as well as being effusively celebrated in the local newspaper the Columbia Sentinel. In 1888, his wife Cornelia died, also in childbirth, and two years later he remarried to Emily Norvell Tant. She was a young widow with four children, Elizabeth, Emily, Jr., Sam, Jr., and Henry. By this time he owned a hotel in the city of Madison, Georgia, the Turnell-Butler Hotel. Together he and Emily had their own child, Norvell, who was born on January 18, 1892. (He took on the forename Oliver at the age of eighteen in his late father's honor). However, Hardy had already been in ill health at the time of his remarriage, and three days before Thanksgiving of 1892, he died suddenly of a heart attack. He is buried beside his second wife Cornelia.