“David J. de Laubenfels, a geographer at the University of Georgia during the 1950s, was a very different sort of traveler from the others. A member of his family had a journal that had been kept by Captain John Rziha, chief topographical engineer of Sherman’s XIV Corps. The maps in the journal covered a sixty-mile section of the March in Georgia, from just east of Covington to Louisville, which is southeast of Milledgeville (with a six-mile gap around Eatonton). In the summer of 1955, de Laubenfels retraced the path in Rziha’s journal and then published two scholarly articles about his findings. Rziha’s maps were notable for their level of detail–he included information about topography, homes, barns, and other outbuildings, fields and forests and roads. De Laubenfels found the maps to be ‘exceedingly accurate, it being possible to find the hills, roads, streams, and even houses exactly where he mapped them for most of the route.’ He did not, however, fall into the trap of believing that the landscape had remained static for ninety-one years, noting that the composition of fields and forests had changed considerably, and that many new roads had sprung up. De Laubenfels was struck by how many of the houses that Rziha had marked in 1864 were still standing in 1955, and he realized that his findings had implications for the myth that Sherman’s men burned everything in their path. He was able to find seventy-two houses between Covington and Milledgeville, including three that Rziha had marked as ‘ruined’ or ‘on fire’ on his map. At least twenty-two were still standing when de Laubenfels came looking, and he received confirmation that at least nine others had been destroyed since the end of the Civil War. He also found another twenty-seven sites that had new buildings on them; he could not pinpoint with certainty what happened to the original buildings, but assumed that at least some of them had survived Sherman. While the landscape and the patchwork of fields and farms had changed considerably over the intervening decades, he attributed those changes to broader structural shifts in Southern agriculture, rather than the ephemeral impact of the March.” [Anne Sarah Rubin, Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman's March and American Memory, pp. 166-167]