The Smith family, of Scots origin, may have come directly from England to the South, ca. 1735, where they settled along the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. Their family intermarried with the Zublys, the Magills, the Rileys, and the Barnwells who also made their living growing rice, cotton, and other crops with slave labor for northern markets. Archibald Smith I and his wife Anne Magill relocated to north Georgia in 1838 with other coastal Georgia planter families and founded Roswell, a cotton factory town, with the help of a New Yorker named Henry Merrell. Merrell later built factories in Greene County, Georgia, and Pike and Camden Counties, Arkansas. Merrell's memoirs have been published as "The Autobiography of Henry Merrell: Industrial Missionary To The South" by James L. Skinner, ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991).

Archibald Smith II (Archie), the only one of the next generation to marry, grew up in the Roswell house. His older brother, William (Willie), died in the Civil War, and his sisters, Elizabeth (Lizzie) and Helen, continued to live in the family home. Therefore, Archie and his family moved to property they bought in LaGrange, Georgia, and then rented or boarded in various communities where the children attended school or the older people escaped harsh winters. Many of the collected Civil War letters of the family have been published as Death of a Confederate by Arthur N. Skinner and James L. Skinner, eds. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996). Archie's wife was Gulielma (Gulie) E. Riley, the youngest daughter of a South Carolina planter who had relocated to Glynn County, Georgia, in the late 1840s. She met the Smith family while they lived near Valdosta as refugees from the Union army, 1864 - 1866. Gulie's older sister had married Archibald Smith Barnwell and died young, leaving a young son, Edward Williamson Barnwell, who grew up with Archie's family and was referred to as "Bubber" or "Brother" by the others. Archie and Gulie's children were: Archibald Smith III, an Atlanta doctor; Frances Maner Smith, known as Maner; and Arthur W. Smith, an architect. Maner and Arthur cared for their parents until they died in Atlanta in the early 1920s. Then the brother and sister set up housekeeping together. Maner died in 1939, and Arthur, then 60, married a middle-aged schoolteacher and Columbia University graduate named Mary Norvell. They reopened the Roswell family home, mainly shut up since Lizzie had died in 1915, and lived there and in Atlanta until the end of their lives. When Mary died in 1981, her heirs, Josephine F. and James L. Skinner, Jr., sold the house and property to the city of Roswell at far under their appraised value because they wanted the home preserved and the property of the Smith home to be Roswell's home: the site of its municipal complex. The Smiths were never prosperous farmers. With the collapse of Southern economy after the Civil War, it was land rental, income from the Bay Street Savannah wharf property, naval stores, and eventually judicious stock investment by Edward Williamson Barnwell and his Smith cousins that kept the family property intact through recessions, depressions, and wars. The Smiths left behind a 140-year-old house filled with documents dating back to the 18th century. This rich collection describes a family that included a planter with abolitionist leanings, several women who created independent lives for themselves outside marriage, a boy soldier who lived beside the shadow of his dead older brother the rest of his life, a wistful Sunday school teacher who yearned for romance and publication, and a successful architect who studied in Paris and finally married at age sixty. Religious, creative, imaginative, and artistic, they multiplied little and finally died out. But they were also sensitive letter writers and meticulous record-keepers who rarely threw anything away. For a description of the papers' provenance, please see the Afterward (p. 269) in Death of a Confederate.