wife left in May 1837 for a trip to New York and Boston, where he worked with his publisher for some months preparing the second edition of his Law Digest for publication. They missed their children and were looking forward to their return. After sailing from New York on October 7, 1837, both Prince and his wife died in the wreck of the steam packet ship SS Home, which was caught in Racer's Storm, a destructive hurricane that hit both the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Although the ship had been converted for ocean going, it carried only three lifeboats and two life preservers. It grounded near Ocracoke Inlet, North Carolina on October 8, 1837, and broke up the next day. The ship was 537 tons, long and wide. The remains of the estimated 90 victims, mostly women and children, were never recovered. Years later, the three Prince children erected a cenotaph in Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon in their parents' honor. Legacy and honors Prince's most famous sketch was published anonymously in The Monitor on June 6, 1807, but it was reprinted, translated into several foreign languages, and published in Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes (1835), which went through several editions in the 19th century. Most famously, the sketch of Captain Clodpole and his Georgia militia recruits is believed to have been plagiarized by the British author Thomas Hardy in his The Trumpet Major (1888), in a chapter on an English rural militia. Such charges were ignored and then denied by Hardy but critics think the similarities are too strong to be coincidence. In 1859 Prince Avenue, the section of the Federal Road west of downtown in Athens, Georgia, was named for him. It had led from town to his plantation. Later in the road's development, it was described as "once one of the nation's finest boulevards." References External links Donald E. Wilkes Jr, "Oliver H. Prince (1782-1837)", New Georgia Encyclopedia (May 15, 2009) Further reading Virginia King Nirenstein, With Kindly Voices (1984) 1787 births 1837 deaths People from Montville, Connecticut Georgia (U.S. state) state senators Writers from Athens, Georgia Georgia (U.S. state) lawyers Accidental deaths in North Carolina Georgia (U.S. state) Jacksonians Democratic Party United States senators from Georgia (U.S. state) American slave owners Deaths due to shipwreck at sea United States senators who owned slaves