Southern Exposure

The Story of the Iron Horse

2010-03-05T21:12:00.002-05:00

Greene County, GA

The infamous 12-foot-tall Iron Horse is an abstract sculpture that was created by Abbott Pattison at UGA's Lamar Dodd School of Art and placed in front of Reed Hall in 1954. Back then, art, and metal sculpture in particular, was new to southern universities and the horse was not well received. Just hours after its placement, students gathered around the iron creature, placed straw in its mouth, manure at its back, and painted the words "front" on its neck and "back" on its tail. Balloons were tied underneath the rear legs, and attempts were made to set the horse on fire. When the fire department arrived, the students refused to back away until eventually the fire hoses were turned on the students.

The day after the incident, the university moved the sculpture to a secret hiding place; R.I. Brittain, a university official. said it was unfortunate that students ''on the college level'' had minds on the level of ''grammar school or nursery children'' and ''react violently to anything new, with which they have not had previous experience.'' In 1959, the Iron Horse was moved to its current location on a farm in Greene County, where it now sits in the middle of a corn field, facing south and away from UGA, visible from GA 15 only in the winter. Jack Curtis, owner of the farm, says they are now judging the corn crops on whether or not they can see the horse.

There have been several attempts to bring the Iron Horse back to campus but they all failed.

The Iron Horse is one of the first things I learned about when I arrived in Athens in 1988, along with The Tree That Owns Itself, The Double-Barreled Cannon, and all that Athens lore.

Bostwick, GA

2009-07-06T09:01:00.015-04:00

Bostwick, GA

[Morgan County]
Population: 354

The founder of Bostwick, John Bostwick, Sr., born in 1859, grew up on a farm in Morgan County. After graduating from the nearby University of Georgia in 1883 with a degree in Engineering, John Bostwick taught at the rural Braswell School which he had attended as a boy. In 1885 he married Susie Green, and gave up teaching for farming, investing his savings in land, which was then available at $ 2-3 an acre. He became a successful cotton farmer at a time when cotton did very well, and in 1892 he started a small mercantile business on his land. In 1901 he also constructed a cotton oil mill, which soon became known as the Bostwick Manufacturing Company; he then helped establish a spur-line from the Central of Georgia Railroad, which connected his property and business to the regional transportation network.

John Bostwick continued purchasing land around his business and divided it into 122 lots for residential development; commercial lots were surveyed along the frontage opposite the supply company. The town of Bostwick for most part belonged to John Bostwick Sr.

With the train running through town, John Bostwick in 1902 built a hotel so that people could stop for overnight trips. The bricks were made from clay from Bostwick's own property. It seems like only the upper floor was used for hotel rooms where nine rooms opened off the central hallway. The original kitchen, dining area, and lobby were located on the ground floor along the northwest side. Additional rooms, apparently used for an apartment for the hotel manager and his family, were also on the ground floor. Bathrooms were located at the rear on both the ground and upper floors. The rear of the second floor was devoted mainly to a Masonic Hall, which Bostwick, an active Mason, provided for the local lodge (the masonic lodge has since moved across the street).

The southeast side ground floor was used for commercial purposes from the beginning. The space consisted of a single room, separated from the original hotel lobby, kitchen and dining room by a plank partition wall. The store was conceived of by John Bostwick, Sr. as a provision store - a use that continued under various owners through the 1970s. Under and with rail-mounted ladders, most of which remain in place today. There was also a screened store office window, at one time located near the entrance, dating from approximately 1915 but now moved to the rear of the lower floor. A well to the north provided water, pumped by a small engine to a steel cistern above. Water was then supplied by gravity to both the floors of the adjacent hotel. As John Bostwick, Sr. had hoped, traveling salesmen stayed for a night at the hotel, eating in the downstairs communal dining area and sitting around the front lobby. The store met the provision needs of the community. Local farmers received credit and paid bills in the store, a practice passed on to successive owners.

In the 1920s, when cotton was king, Bostwick thrived. The town had two cotton gins, a cotton seed oil mill, a depot and train station, a bank, a hotel, a dry cleaning business, three doctors, a blacksmith shop, post office, and three businesses with gas pumps. Two of the gas pumps, long out of order and slowly rusting away, still stand guard on Ruark Lane today.

World War I, the ensuing economic crisis, the bollweevil and the sudden decline of cotton prices reversed Bostwick's fortunes. Overextended like many other cotton farmers and processors, Bostwick was forced to sell off parts of his substantial commercial holdings but he continued to play an important role in the economic development in Morgan County. Descendants of John Bostwick, Sr. still live in town today.

Bostwick in 2009:

The Bostwick Gin is one of the few operational cotton gins left in Georgia. Sitting idly by the side of GA 83 for most of the year, it is inspected and repaired every fall and fired up for the cotton harvest which typically starts around the time of the Annual Cotton Festival which takes place every year on the first Saturday of November, and features a road race, parade (including a most impressive accumulation of tractors), arts, crafts and food. The cotton mill is in operation during the festival and visitors are invited to file through the old gin to see how this all works. It is loud and dusty but well worth the trip. All proceeds from the festival go toward the continuing restoration of the Susie Agnes Hotel.

This abandoned building adjacent to the cotton gin was once used to store fertilizer. The railroad spur ran to the right of the building (between the building and the gin). The building is often mistaken for a cotton warehouse, but Bostwick never had one.

The Susie Agnes Hotel, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994, is an example of a turn-of-the-century commercial and hotel building typically found Georgia's smalltowns. The building was designed by W.D. Calvin, a local Morgan County architect and builder who also designed several other buildings in Bostwick. The building was originally used as both hotel and commercial space as well as a meeting space for the local Masonic Lodge. It serves as the City Hall today.

The Bostwick Supply Company, the area country store that once also housed the local post office and bank, had remained in operation as a general store and later, video rental, until March 2009. You could stop by to pick up a few nails, buy some hoop cheese, marvel at the collection of old stuff and remnants of the bank inside the store, pet Ringo the dog, and then grab a hot dog and a coke and hang out on the porch to watch the world go by. If you'd hang out long enough you could catch one of the Ruarks stopping by, and you could talk cotton; but eventually, the bad economic times and a crumbling building forced the store to close its doors for now. Today, it stands abandoned, but no less proud.

Agriculture: Bostwick is surrounded by lots and lots of farmland, thankfully still untouched by sprawling Atlanta. Just north of town lies the Ruark Sod Farm, which attracts migrating birds and bird watchers in spring and fall. Other fields grow rotating crops of wheat, soybeans and cotton.

On October 22, 2002, the entire historic district of Bostwick was added to the National Register of Historic Places. A historic marker was unveiled during the 2007 Cotton Gin Festival. Hope remains that although funds are low, all the buildings will eventually be restored.

Mosquito Crossing, GA

2009-01-10T22:52:00.005-05:00

Mosquito Crossing, GA [Greene County]
Photo by Marion Post Wolcott, 1939
[from the FSA archives]

Mosquito Crossing, GA [Greene County]
2008

Marion Post was born on June 7, 1910 in Montclair, New Jersey. Her parents divorced when she was 13, and she lived in a boarding school or with her mother in Greenwich Village where she was exposed to art at a young age. Her sister Helen studied photography in Vienna, and when Marion visited her, Helen's teacher encouraged her to pursue photography as well. Before returning to the U.S., Marion bought a camera and continued to take photos. Ralph Steiner and Paul Strand recommended her to the FSA which was so impressed with her work that she was hired on the spot. Her photographs for the FSA often explore the political aspects of poverty and deprivation as well as the beautiful positive side of America. They also often find humour in the situations she encountered. Marion Post Wolcott contributed 15,000 photos to the extensive FSA archives.

In 1941, Marion Post met Lee Wolcott. When she had finished her assignments for the FSA she married him, and gave up photography when raising a family became a priority. Marion Post Wolcott died on November 24, 1990, in Santa Barbara, CA.

In 1939, Marion Post Wolcott traveled through Greene County, GA and took the above photo of Mosquito Crossing which consists mainly of a general store that sits at the crossroads of Old Sparta and Syryp Mill Crossing Roads, between Greensboro and Sparta. Not much has changed since then. The dusty road has been paved, the sandy land has been partially reforested, and the mill adjacent to the store has not survived, but the store itself is still there and has recently been fixed up and offered for rent.

Mosquito Crossing, GA [Greene County]
May 1, 2005

Mosquito Crossing, GA [Greene County]
April 17, 2007

The FSA was established in 1935 as part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and given the mission to support small farmers and restore land and communities damaged by the Depression. The photographers employed under the FSA (which also included Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee and Louise Rosskam) produced images that greatly impacted how both policy-makers and the general public understood the Depression.

Book recommendation: "Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-1943" by Paul Hendrickson. It contains 175 color photos from the FSA archives.

Ruskin, GA

2008-12-23T15:15:00.008-05:00

Ruskin, GA [Ware County]

The Ruskin Colony, named after the English socialist writer John Ruskin, was a utopian socialist community in Tennessee from 1896-1899; after it was dissolved, the remaining 240 colonists moved what was left of their possessions by train to south Georgia to this place just outside Waycross, conveniently located right on the railroad tracks. Here they merged with the Duke Colony and became known as the Ruskin Commonwealth. After only one year, the colonists' number had dropped by half: the land was not very fertile, the water sources were bad, and the colonists were plagued with disease. They quickly slid into poverty and in order to settle their debts, the Ware County sheriff auctioned off all there belongings thus forcing the colony’s demise 1901. All that is left today is a church standing in by the railroad tracks. It is hard to imagine that this once was a settlement that housed 240 people. The church is very pretty and well maintained, something to be thankful for I guess.

The Georgia Wildfires of 2007

2008-12-23T14:28:00.008-05:00

Okefenokee Swamp, GA [Charlton County]

The above photo was taken on April 5, 2007, during a camping trip to Stephen C. Foster State Park near Fargo, GA. I was hoping to see more of the swamp but due to severe drought conditions, boat tours were limited, and the Trembling Earth Boardwalk led through dry woods instead of over swamp water.

On April 16, 2007, just 11 days after my visit, a tree fell on a power line in Waycross and started a fire which, due to drought conditions, low humidity and high winds quickly spread and entered the Okefenokee NWR four days later. There it combined with a wildfire that had started a week earlier inside the swamp. By April 30, the fire had consumed 80,000 acres (320 qkm), 20 % of which were in the refuge. By May 9, 116,000 acres (469 qkm) had been burned within the triangle formed by Waycross in the north, Fargo in the west and Folkston in the east. The next day, sub-tropical storm Andrea crossed over bringing with it more wind but unfortunately, very little rain. As a result, the fire spread to northern Florida. A separate fire started on the Okefenokee's Bugaboo Island on May 8; it spread extremely fast and soon combined with the Waycross fire. Eventually, these fires burned more than 600,000 acres (2,400 qkm) of the Okefenokee region in three months. Essentially all of the swamp burned, though the degrees of impact vary widely. During the time of these fires, smoke blanketed much of South Georgia and sometimes drifted as far north as Atlanta (300 miles) and as far south as Orlando (250 miles).

The scars of the massive wildfire of 2007 were still visible a year later on Chesser Island in the Okefenokee NWR, about 10 miles west of Folkston. Wildfires are a common and necessary occurence in the swamp but a chain of events led to the largest wildfire in the history of both Georgia and Florida, the largest wildfire to occur outside of Alaska, and the most expensive wildfire ever for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ($ 30 million).

At The Liquor Store

2008-12-19T16:00:00.011-05:00

St. Mary's Liquors, U.S. 17, Nassau County [FL]

This abandoned liquor store sits on U.S. 17, adjacent to the equally abandoned Riverside Motel, in Nassau County, Florida. With the Georgia state line less than a mile down the road, we can safely assume that this was a hopping place on Sundays - to this date, alcohol sales are generally prohibited in Georgia on Sundays, with some exceptions made at the discretion of local governments. Cities and counties of sufficiently large populations may authorize Sunday alcohol sales by the drink at festivals, large events, and licensed establishments in which most revenue is generated through sales of prepared food.

Georgia is one of only three states that prohibit stores to sell alcohol on Sunday (Connecticut and Indiana are the other two). Legislators have been pushing for several years to have the ban lifted, to no avail. The Sunday sales measure will be reintroduced in early 2009 and is expected to again be vigorously debated.

When I moved to Georgia 20 years ago, the concept of not being able to purchase a bottle of wine on a Sunday was quite new to me. When out in a bar or club on a Saturday night, I found the custom of "last call" at 11:45 pm strange and somewhat amusing. Another law that took some getting used to was the "open container law". Interestingly, Georgia is one of seven states that have no state law against general public possession and/or consumption of an open container by a person of legal drinking age, however, nearly all local jurisdictions in Georgia do prohibit public open containers, and Athens, GA is one of them. In another ironic twist, the open container law does not apply on the University of Georgia's football game days, when the town turns into one big tailgating party where plenty of booze flows in plain view.

Toomsboro, GA

2008-12-19T13:52:00.006-05:00

Toomsboro, GA [Wilkinson County]

Toomsboro is located in the heart of Georgia on a railroad line that crosses the kaolin country between Sandersville and Macon. Once a booming little railroad town, it has an almost ghost town feel today - the general store, opera house, hotel and depot sit quietly in the hot Georgia sun silent reminders of the hustle and bustle that once characterized this town.

The Swampland Opera House, seen in the background of the photo aboe, was built in 1916, and originally housed a dry goods store and a bank. In 1975, Joe Boone, Jr. started the Swampland Opera House as a weekend venue for musicians throughout the southeast and each Saturday until 2000, a country, gospel & bluegrass music fest was held here. The building features a stage with theater seating, a restaurant, vintage bank with vault and a second-story loft with elevator access. The loft area was used as a movie theatre at one time.

The Murray Hall General Store and gas station was built before the Civil War, and was originally a whiskey store. Mr. Hall's sister taught first grade in Toombsboro for several decades. The store is locked up but according to locals still contains a good amount of original merchandise. There were plans to offer public tours to the store as part of the "Wilkinson Weekends" project, but I am not sure these plans ever materialized.

The Willett Hotel was built in the 1800s and has recently been completely restored. It features 16 rooms and 14 baths, refinished hardwood floors throughout, new central heat and air, high ceilings, extensive woodwork and many other vintage features. It was part of the Toomsboro package that was for sale a few years ago for only $ 695,000 according to some sources and a more realistic figure of 6,950,000 according to others.

The hotel was quite busy in the early years of its existence, when Toomsboro was an important railroad stop and had a lively economy. This is where mainly traveling salesmen and newly arrived teachers stayed.

The Central of Georgia Railroad line connecting Savannah and Macon County was built between 1835-1843. When the road was being surveyed, the citizens of Irwinton did not want it to run through their town for fear that the trains would run over all their livestock and children - the same reluctance, or hindsight, could be seen in Oglethorpe County's towns of Maxeys and Lexington. Irwinton, the Wilkinson County seat, was thus by-passed by the railroad; smaller stations along the road were originally known by their numbers such as 15, 16, and 17, standing for Emmitt, Wriley and Gordon respectively.

At first, there was no station at Toomsboro, with station 15 (Emmitt) only one mile to the east. Toomsboro emerged later; the first post office was established in 1859 and the town was incorporated in 1904. Today, Toomsboro has a population of 619 (2007). Trains, long ones at that, still pass through, but they no longer stop. This Norfolk Southern railroad line runs from Savannah to Millen to Tennille, through Toomsboro to Gordon and Macon, then from Macon to Columbus where it curves north and dead-ends in Greenville (GA).

Pomegranate Hall

2008-12-19T11:04:00.004-05:00

Pomegranate Hall [c. 1830], Sparta, GA [Hancock County] 2008

Pomegranate Hall was built in the 1830s by Judge Nathan Sayre and is located where Elm Street (which runs south from Broad Street) dead-ends on Adams Street. At the time, the house was painted a "monastic brown"which gave it a distinct Mediterranean appearance, and was sitting on several acres of lush Georgia land.

The house is made of granite (possibly coming from Elberton, GA) and brick with walls two feet thick. The main floor consisted of an elaborate entrance hall, two reception rooms and Judge Sayre's extensive library. Features like marble mantles and silver bells and knobs gave it a sophisticated urban rather than rustic feel. The multi-level house has many entrances, stairs and cul-de-sacs, and in the back, the house is three stories high. Underneath the front porch, barely visible today due to the heavy vegetation, is another entrance leading into the the brick-floored ground level. The house was generally referred to as a "half house" but it is unclear if it was due to the fact that its entrance was to the side rather than at the center, or if it shared materials such as shutters and doors with the Sayre home in Newark, NJ.

The original stair case led up to the center of the front porch, and was later moved to the right side of the house.

A guest at the house in 1839 described her upstairs room as "delightfully situated; our windows attracted all the breezes and commanded imposing and beautiful views of the whole town and surrounding country".

On an interesting side note, Nathan Sayre was one of few people of his time who challenged the racial color code. Although he never married, he had several children with one of his slave women and later lived with but never married Susan Hunt, who was part Cherokee, African, and Caucasion. They raised their three children here at Pomegranate Hall. In his library, Sayre kept books that argued AGAINST the then common belief that racially mixed offspring inevitably is degenerate and physically inferior. It is believed that the complicated layout of the house was to support the equally complicated family dynamics.

After Judge Sayre's death in 1853, the house was bought by the Simpson family who owned it when diarist Frances Andrews stayed here shortly after Sherman had burned down everything a few miles south. The house then went to Judge Seaborn Reese who later replaced Alexander H. Stephens, native of nearby Crawfordville, GA, as congressman. In 1963, the widow of Oliver Macy (of the Macy's Department Store family) moved in and lived here until she died in the fall of 1992. The next owner was Emily K. Hair, widow of the late historian Dr. William Ivy Hair. In 2003, current owner Jerry Erickson bought the house from Steve Hair, who had inherited it from his late mother.

According to Jerry Erickson and several Sparta residents, Ms. Hair in 1999 or 2000 was burning her son's clothes on his bed; the story is that he had a drug problem and burning his clothes was her way of dealing with it. Unfortunately, the fire spread from the bedroom down the stairwell and into the furnace, finally engulfing the entire upper floor. It's amazing that the house still stands. The photo on the right, taken in February 2008, shows the three-story back of the house and the fire damage.

Restoring a historic building in compliance with city codes and codes that apply to historic structures is very expensive, and Mr. Erickson is doing his best to preserve the home while applying for funds and grants which is a tedious process. There is no estimate at this time as to when restoration of Pomegranate Hall will be resumed and/or completed.