At Fair Park in Dallas, in front of the old Hall of Administration, a young woman rises out of a cactus with a sprig of cotton in her hand. Raoul Josset designed her for the 1936 Texas Centennial, and José Martin carved her in about ten days.¹ She is called The Spirit of the Centennial.

Her face belongs to a girl born in Blooming Grove. Georgia Ann Carroll was born on 18 November 1919 on her grandfather's farm here.² Her father, Roger Mills Carroll, raised sheep.³ The family moved to Dallas when she was three.

Her grandparents were James Alexander Texas Carroll and Alice Pevehouse, married in Navarro County in 1868.⁴ He had been born in 1849 at Sabine Pass, while his family was on its way to Texas from Mississippi.⁵ Their old home place, with a small family burying ground, lies a mile or two south of town off FM 55.⁶ Her father and three of his brothers, Dan, Ed and Dee, are buried at Rose Hill Cemetery in town.⁷ Carroll land still lies north of town too⁸, on the survey first laid out for Jane Cazneau.

Josset met her while judging a Miss Bluebonnet contest and asked the sixteen-year-old to pose.⁹ Every account gives her the face. The body came from another model; one account says she would not sit for it.¹⁰ Josset said the girl stood for “the hospitality and the joy in life of its inhabitants, as well as the health and strong character of its workers.”¹¹

At seventeen she was signed by the John Robert Powers agency in New York, and three days later she was being photographed for the cover of Redbook, under the headline “The Rise of Georgia.”¹² Eight more Redbook covers followed.¹³ She made fourteen films and played Betsy Ross opposite James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942).¹⁴

In 1943 she became the singer with Kay Kyser's band, and in 1944 she married him. They settled in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where at fifty she took a degree in studio art and helped start the town's preservation society. She died there on 14 January 2011, aged 91.¹⁵

The statue still stands. Next time you are at the Fair, look up at her face.

If your family has pictures or stories of the Carrolls of Blooming Grove, we would like to hear from you.