Oliver Hardy wounded at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862 and was a recruiting officer for Company K, 16th Georgia Regiment. The elder Oliver Hardy assisted his father in running the vestiges of the family cotton plantation following the Civil War. He then bought a share in a retail business and was elected full-time Tax Collector for Columbia County, Georgia. Hardy's mother Emily Norvell was the daughter of Thomas Benjamin Norvell and Mary Freeman, descended from Captain Hugh Norvell of Williamsburg, Virginia who arrived in Virginia before 1635. The elder Hardy and Norvell married March 12, 1890; it was her
Oliver Hardy than the actors that he saw. A friend suggested that he move to Jacksonville, Florida, where some films were being made, which he did in 1913. He worked in Jacksonville as a cabaret and vaudeville singer at night, and at the Lubin Manufacturing Company during the day. It was at this time that he met Madelyn Saloshin, a pianist whom he married on November 17, 1913 in Macon, Georgia. The next year, he made his first movie "Outwitting Dad" (1914) for the Lubin studio, billed as O. N. Hardy. In his personal life, he was known as "Babe" Hardy, and