Troup County Archives has received, from the estate of Dr. Leland Madison Park, this portrait of Dr. Thomas Randolph Lamar, by noted Georgia artist John Maier.

Leland Park never resided in LaGrange but, over the years, he acknowledged his family ties to this area through generous support of Troup County Historical Society. He was born in Orlando, Florida on October 21, 1941, the son of Arthur H. and Rebecca Leland Park. His grandfather, Lemuel Madi-son Park, established a cotton mill in LaGrange around the turn of the twentieth century, when he purchased the old Troup Factory on Flat Shoals Creek and moved the operation to a new mill on Greenville Street. Leland began a long association with Davidson College when he enrolled as a freshman in 1959. He earned a master’s degree at Emory and his Ph.D. from Florida State, then returned to Davidson to head their library until he retired in 2006. He died February 3, 2019.

Portrait of Dr. Thomas Randolph Lamar

John Maier painted the portrait, probably in the early 1850s. Maier was born in Wurtemburg, Germany, in 1819. He succeeded as an artist in spite of losing an eye in a childhood accident. When he was about twenty-one years old he immigrated to America, and worked for a while in New York and Connecticut. In 1850, he married Maria Ann Berkele, and the couple moved to Georgia. It is said that Maier preferred to paint landscapes but his skill as a portrait artist paid the bills. Howell Cobb, Robert Toombs, and Alexander H. Stevens were among the prominent Georgians who commissioned Maier’s work. Readers of Clio Notes are probably familiar with Maier’s portrait of Governor George M. Troup. As he aged, his health declined and he began to lose sight in his remaining eye. On March 6, 1877, he committed suicide. He is buried in Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery. His son and his brother-in-law founded the Atlanta jewelry firm of Maier and Berkele.

The subject of the portrait, Dr. Thomas Randolph Lamar, has proved to be an enigmatic character, despite being a scion of one of Georgia’s most illustrious families – one brother was the noted jurist, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, and another, Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar, founded the Columbus Enquirer and went on to become president of the Republic of Texas. Thomas left few clues to his identity in the written record. We find him in the 1850 census for Bibb County listed as a fifty-year-old physician whose wife, Eliza was twenty years his junior. Only a year later, the Macon newspaper reported that Eliza, wife of Dr. Thomas R. Lamar, died on February 3, 1851. Perhaps with additional research in the Bibb County court records, we can uncover more about “the other Lamar brother.” The portrait is on display in the Archives library. – Randall Allen