USA > Georgia > The story of Georgia and the Georgia people, 1732 to 1860 > Part 31
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As soon as the great value of the cotton lands was dis covered, and all danger from the Indians was removed, the county became very attractive to men of large means, and it was soon turned into a great plantation and negro quar ter.
In no part of the State was planting carried on on so large a scale. From one hundred to two thousand bales o cotton was the ordinary crop of a Baker county planter The cotton was sent by steamer down the Flint and Apa- lachicola to Apalachicola in Florida, and thence shipped to New York and Europe.
The plantations were very large and the pine woods ad- joining were almost unpeopled, and in 1830 in the entire
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ounty, now divided into several counties, there were only ,253 inhabitants of all kinds, of whom the larger number vere whites, but in 1850, after the planters had begun their ettlements, there were 8,000, of whom 4,000 were negroes. The pine lands were at first regarded merely as grazing and and were not valued by the cotton-planters, but when cultivated were found to be almost equal to the hummocks n fertility, and they too were put in cotton fields.
Baker received quite an uplift when the Central road, hen the Southwestern, reached Albany and there was quick transportation. The transfer of the cotton-planting interest From the upper counties, from Liberty, Burke, Baldwin and Putnam, to Baker was made rapidly after 1850 and there was quick transit to Savannah. Albany became quite an im- portant cotton market. The county was then divided into Baker and Dougherty.
There was little likelihood that a county of large planta- tions and absentee landlords would be a county of good schools or prosperous churches, and this county, outside of Albany, suffered for the want of them for many years. Schools were few and churches were fewer. The planters did not live on their estates in many cases, and those who did were too few to keep up good schools. So they sent their children abroad or employed private tutors. There were too few people to form good congregations, and although Methodist and Baptist preachers were in the county from its settlement and had churches and many members among the slaves, they had small following among the whites.
LEE.
Lee county adjoins Baker on its northern side. It was laid out in 1826 and was named Lee in honor of "Light Horse Harry." This county was the exact counterpart of Baker. It was very fertile, but was considered quite un- 26
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healthy, and was but slowly settled. In 1830 there were but 1,680 people in a very large county; but when its resources as a cotton country were discovered it had the same history as Baker. It was bought up by wealthy plan- ters and turned into a great cotton plantation. The plan- ters of Bibb, Baldwin, Jones and Putnam transferred the larger part of their working force to Lee and put them in charge of overseers; and the history given of Baker tells. the story of Lee in all its details.
There was for years after the county was settled very bad drinking water, many ponds and much ill health. Whites deserted the country, and the plantations became immense, for Georgia negroes by the hundreds were settled on them in charge of overseers.
Captain Fort succeeded in solving the water problem by boring a deep artesian well. His example was followed by others, and now there is, as in Baker and Dougherty, good water everywhere.
Before the war the county was so thinly settled by white people that the conditions usual in such sections were found here. Schools were few and churches fewer. After the war, with the building up of the villages along the railway, there was improvement on all these lines.
DECATUR.
The immense county of Early was made into a number of new counties, and among them one on its lower border extending to the Florida line was made in 1823. It was called Decatur after the gallant Commodore, and its county site was named Bainbridge in honor of Commodore Bain- bridge.
The description given of Early county in the preceding chapter is applicable in almost all respects to Decatur.
It contained a great body of pine land, through which the Flint river ran diagonally into the Chattahoochee. There
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were a number of large creeks in the county, and on these rivers and creeks there was much rich hummock land tim- bered with oak, hickory and other hardwood trees. The main body of the land was pine land, and, as was universal in the first settlement, it was regarded as mere grazing land and was esteemed as of little worth. The lands on the rivers were fertile and accessible, and were soon taken up by the wealthy cotton-planters, many of whom moved from the eastern counties of Georgia, and some from South Carolina. These cotton-planters bought large bodies of pine land in connection with the land they cultivated and had very large estates.
For convenience of access to the outside world the larger planters lived near the Chattahoochee or Flint rivers, and really had but little intercourse with the stock-raisers scat- tered over the pine-barrens of this county. These Chatta- hoochee and Flint river planters lived, as did those who were near them in Early, in a community of their own. They had many slaves and splendid mansions, and no people in Georgia lived with greater elegance. The history of the great Munnerlyn estate will perhaps give a better exhibit of this one phase of this southwestern Georgia life than any general statement:
Mr. Munnerlyn went from South Carolina to Florida; but not being pleased he bought the famous Fowltown tract in Decatur county. It lay between the rivers, where the Indians had a town. Here he settled a large plantation. There were thousands of acres in the tract. He built a large and comfortable mansion house with broad verandas, wide halls and airy rooms. There was about it a large park, a well-kept flower-garden, a large kitchen-garden and all the needful equipment of a gentleman's home. The plantation was on the river, the fields stretching out along its banks for miles. There were several settlements known as negro quarters, each with scores of negroes and each in
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charge of an overseer. The discipline spoken of elsewhere was observed on the estate, and for many years there was great prosperity. Mr. Munnerlyn was merely one of many; but after the war it was no longer possible to keep up the admirable discipline that had brought success, and the great estate was abandoned.
On the banks of the Chattahoochee, isolated and remote from all people of like kind, there was, up to 1860, an elegance, a refinement and a style of living equal to any in the land. There were books, periodicals, newspapers, musical instruments, and all the comforts and many of the luxuries of life. The fine fish and oysters of the coast, fruit from the West Indies, flour from Baltimore, and all the table comforts furnished by the city market were at the planter's call, while his own plantation supplied all the poultry, the mutton, the beef and hams demanded by the generous housekeeper. There was a lavish hospitality, and during all the winter a houseful of guests. The life of the James river planter of the last century and of the sea island planter of the first part of this was reproduced in the west- ern border of Georgia, where for scores of miles east of the river there were only log cabins and poor, plain rustics. The main body of the Decatur people lived in the pine woods and had the same features of character belonging to these stock-raisers everywhere.
Then the railroads came, with the usual result.
There were in the county in 1830 3,850 people, and in 1850 about 8,000, of whom there were 3,639 slaves.
In a county like that of Decatur, where there was such inequality in social conditions, there was, of course, great inequality in the school and religious privileges. In certain wealthy neighborhoods there were congregations of select people, while in the pine forests the churches were few and far apart and were attended by the poor and illiterate. The results following the war produced great changes in
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this direction. The building of the railway from Savannah to the Chattahoochee, and from Montgomery, Ala., to Bainbridge brought all parts of Decatur into notice.
Bainbridge, the county site of Decatur, was for some years, on account of its location on the river, the most important town in this section of southwest Georgia. With the building of the railway to Albany and the decline of Apalachicola it suffered a temporary decline, but with the extension of the railroad and the building of the line from Montgomery it was provided with excellent railroad facili- ties, and has become quite a busy and prosperous city.
There are sundry small villages along the railways in the county which are centers of a good trade.
THOMAS.
Thomas county, on the line of Florida, was laid out in 1826. It was named in honor of General Jett Thomas, a soldier of 1812. It was in the main a pine woods county in which there were a few bodies of fertile hummock land. In common with all sections of this kind, it drew to it two very different classes of settlers, the cattle-raiser and the cotton-planter; but it was very thinly settled for a long time. It had in 1830 only 3,000 inhabitants when it em- braced what are now several large counties; and at this early day 1, 168 of these first comers were slaves. Although the size of the county was greatly reduced, in 1850 there were 9,000, of whom 5,155 were slaves.
Many of its first people emigrated from Bulloch, Screven, Burke, Laurens and Montgomery, and brought with them a number of slaves. The planters located on the rich hum- mocks near the Florida line, and raised cotton. Large fortunes were rapidly made. The cotton was sent by wagons to Magnolia, St. Marks and Newport, Fla., and shipped by sailing vessels to New York. The land was very fertile, and the cotton product was very large. The planter,
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being remote from markets, depended largely on his own resources, and few planters were so independent or so prosperous.
The pine woods furnished a range of wide extent, and the cattle fed on the wild pastures and increased to large numbers.
The county was healthy and negroes increased rapidly, and as land was abundant and cheap the first comer se- cured a large body of it, and although he lived a long way in the interior, he was only a three-days' journey from the Gulf coast and found a ready market for his cotton there, and so his property rapidly increased.
The poorer class lived in great simplicity and did not differ from the ordinary pine woods people whom we have so often described. Those of them who first settled near the plantation of the rich planter, whose favorite maxim was " poor land is the best neighbor," sold out his small lot of two hundred and fifty acres and went to Florida.
The homes of some of the wealthy planters just before the war were very elegant. They generally lived on or near their plantations, and as they had access to the city markets through St. Marks or Newport, and as they had money to their credit in New York, they bought often- times handsome furniture, and as they had abundant timber and often a lumber-mill of their own, and their own car- penters and brick-makers, they built themselves commo- dious and handsome residences. The plantation furnished them with all the comforts they needed; the most beautiful flowers, exotics elsewhere, grew in the open air. The water-oaks were of great size, the magnolia was indigenous and the yellow jessamine and the red woodbine festooned the forest trees.
The good women were famous as housekeepers and labor was abundant.
The young people were sent abroad for an education and
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had the advantage of the best schools. As the wealthy cotton-planters lived remote from the seaboard, shut up to themselves, they formed an exclusive circle, but one suffi- ciently extensive for pleasant society.
There was no sale for the smaller products of the plan- tation, and so the planter's table was laden with the most toothsome viands from his own estate, and his hospitality was boundless.
Thomasville was a quiet little village for many years after it was settled, but with the building of the railway it became quite a mart of trade. When the war ended atten- tion was drawn to its matchless winter climate. Great hotels were built and visitors came by the thousands. Many of these visitors were so well pleased with the county that they decided to establish winter homes in it, and in Thomasville and in the country roundabout some of them built very handsome homes and purchased large bodies of land as hunting lodges. These winter visitors form a soci- ety of their own and have little to do with the people of the city or county in which they sojourn for a little while. They spend only a few of the severest weeks of the year in this climate and then return northward.
The sand pear, or LeConte pear, was found so admi- rably suited to the soil around Thomasville, that until the blight reached the trees, it seemed as if the whole county would be a pear orchard; but while the blight checked, it has not entirely destroyed the fruit-raising industry.
The little towns of Boston and Cairo, one on the east and the other on the west of Thomasville, are both sprightly towns, with a good trade.
Thomasville, by the bequest of Remur Young, has a small and feeble chartered college for girls, called by his name, and there is a male school which is owned by the city, known as the South Georgia College, and the usual county public schools in all sections of the county.
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Few parts of the State have grown with greater rapidity than Thomas has since the war, although its progress has been retarded by the purchase of large bodies of land by the rich men of the north and west, which have been turned into game preserves and which are owned by ab- sentee landlords who only visit the county once a year, and take no interest in its development and have little in- tercourse with its people.
WARE.
In 1824, out of the great county of Irwin, which em- braced so much of southern Georgia, several counties were formed. One of these was the county of Ware, named in honor of Nicholas Ware of Augusta.
We have already seen the county from which it was made, Irwin, and there was but little to distinguish this part of the county from any other part of it. It had, how- ever, in its borders one of the largest swamps in America, the Okefinokee, which has no rival in America except the Dismal Swamp in Virginia and the Everglades in Florida. This swamp has been explored but partially, and has been found to be a vast marsh, with occasional lakes and islands. There is in it some good timber of various kinds. The swamp was purchased from the State a few years since by a land company, and an effort was made to drain it by a large canal. The promoters hoped not only to drain the swamp, but by the canal to provide a means for floating the timber found in it to the Satilla river, and thus recover much land for cultivation and secure timber for the mills. The effort, however, has not been a successful one. The great swamp was a hiding place for deserters during the war. It is famous for its fish and its vast number of wild bee-trees with their stores of honey and beeswax.
The county of Ware had few advantages for agriculture, and was almost entirely given up to cattle-raising until the
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building of the Atlantic and Gulf railroad, when the vast timber resources of the country were first developed.
After the war the turpentine farms were opened, and when the great Plant System of railways decided on a direct line to Florida, to provide for its Florida travel, it made the point of departure from its main line a little vil- lage in Ware called Waycross, where the Brunswick and Western railroad crosses the Savannah, Florida and West- ern. Here it resolved to build large shops and have a hos- pital. A city sprang up, and now there are three fine school buildings, electric lights and water-works.
For many years the country was thinly settled. Churches were few and schools were rare. The people were good, poor people who were isolated and illiterate and had little ambition- to improve their condition. But perhaps in no part of the State is there now more intelligence or a better type of piety.
Waresboro has become quite a prosperous little town, and there are churches and villages all along the various railroads which permeate the country. The artesian well has opened up inexhaustible fountains of pure water, and the health of the country and city is now remarkably good.
LOWNDES.
Lowndes county was laid off from Irwin in 1825, and was named in honor of the free-trader Senator Lowndes of South Carolina. Its first county site was Troupville, named for Governor Troup. When it was decided to move the county site to where it is now the name chosen was Val- dosta, which was the name of Governor Troup's country home.
It has a wide stretch of pine woods, broken into by a few hummocks. The rivers which traverse the county have no swamps, but make their way through banks of sand. There is some pine land which is productive, some that is very
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sterile, and some that is too flat for good drainage. The hummocks are productive, and the county as a whole is a good one.
The land was laid off originally in large lots of 490 acres, and those who had only one lot were accounted as having a very small holding.
The people generally were independent and contented. They had no slaves, or but few; had little and wanted little. But there were almost from its first settlement a few large planters who had extensive plantations and many slaves. Their homes were plain but comfortable. But the most of the people were mere stock-raisers who lived at home. They were, like the other piny woods people, comfortable and contented. They lived on the large land lots remote from each other, and made no other effort than to live comfortably and independently.
The railroad came, the little hamlet of Valdosta began to grow, and trade from the counties roundabout began to come into it. The mill man came to make lumber, the tur- pentine distiller to make turpentine, and the little town became a city, with banks, factories and wholesale stores and handsome churches and other public buildings.
The county of Lowndes was near no navigable stream, and had no railroads, and was for many years settled only by those who wanted to lead a quiet life and who had little hope of making fortunes.
There came into the county at an early date many de- scendants of the old Salzburghers, who made a most ad- mirable class of settlers.
There was some cotton raised in the county, which found a market at St. Marks; but there was little bought or sold.
But little attention was paid to religious culture or edu- cation until the railway reached the county, and for a num- ber of years afterward; but now there is a fine graded school in Valdosta and good schools in all sections of the county.
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RANDOLPH.
The county of Randolph was the second county in Geor- gia named for John Randolph. It lay on the Chattahoochee, and when laid out in 1828 the Indians were on the Alabama side. The county was a pine woods one, was very remote from the center of population, and did not attract settlers rapidly; but it had a considerable number of people scat- tered over it who were engaged in raising cattle.
After the last Indian trouble in 1836, when the town of Roanoke was burned, the value of the lands in Randolph was discovered and the county began to improve. The opening of the Southwestern railroad brought into it a large body of new immigrants.
There is but little to distinguish this county from the other piny woods counties of the southwestern part of Georgia; but it has been exceptionally fortunate in the class of people who have settled it.
Cuthbert, the county site, is a beautiful, enterprising and prosperous city. Its citizens have taken great pride in its educational advancement, and before the war the Baptists and Methodists had each a college for girls located here. The Methodist college was burned a few years since, but has been rebuilt. It is an elegant building and the school has a large patronage. There are good churches and schools in every part of the county, which is steadily im- proving.
MARION.
Marion county was named in honor of the great partizan chief, and was laid off from Lee and Muscogee. Much of it was sterile pine woods, but there are sundry bodies of good land scattered through it.
It had in it in 1830 only about 1,300 people all told, but in 1850 the population was over 11,000, of which 3,600 were slaves.
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Buena Vista, which was made the county site in 1847, since the railroad reached it, has become a prosperous town.
The inhabitants in the county are a plain, good people, and there are churches and schools in all parts of the county.
As in all the pine woods counties, there has been a de- cided advance in all material interests since the war and since the introduction of fertilizers; but as the county has been reduced in size by its giving of territory to contiguous counties newly formed, there has been no increase in its population, which in 1890 was only 7,000.
MUSCOGEE.
The present county of Muscogee is not a large nor is it agriculturally a rich county. It derives its importance from being the county in which the city of Columbus, with its valuable manufacturing interests, is located.
As we shall speak of the city in another chapter, we have little to say of the county now. It is largely of pine woods and the pine lands are thin and generally sterile. There are sundry creeks in the county and there are some good bottom lands upon them, but the country around the city is not generally fertile.
The Chattahoochee in Muscogee flows over great beds of rock and forms an immense shoal and gives an almost unlimited water-power. South of the shoals the river is navigable to the Gulf, and along it are some fine productive bottoms.
The county was not thickly settled, the attention of the people being turned almost entirely to the city, and the proximity to the Indians across the river making it some- what perilous to live isolated. After the city grew and the Indians were removed the planters chose the rich lands of Alabama. There is but little outside of Columbus and its vicinity of interest in Muscogee as it at present stands.
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CHAPTER IX.
1829 TO 1837.
Governor Gilmer- Gold Discovery in Habersham-The Rush of Intruders- Troubles of the Governor with them and with the Indians-Extension of Georgia Laws over the Cherokee Nation-Recusant Missionaries Arrested and Convicted-Their Imprisonment in the State Prison-Governor Lump- kin-Governor Schley-Flush Times-Banking Mania-Wild Speculation- List of Enterprises-Manual Labor Schools-Mercer University-Emory College-Oglethorpe University-Wesleyan Female College-Mission Work among the Cherokees-Final Removal of the Cherokees-New Counties Laid Out-The Mountains and the Mountaineers-The Settlers in the Hill Country-State Benevolences-Asylum for Deaf and Dumb-Asylum for Lunatics-First Public Move towards Securing a History of Georgia-The First Geological Survey-Dr. Cotting-The Gold-seekers-Salting Mines- The Blue Limestone Country-Political Strife-Newspapers-Education- Religion-The Great Railroad Movement.
Authorities as in last period, with Prince's Digest, files of newspapers, Gilmer's Georgians.
George R. Gilmer, who was elected governor, has already been sketched in my account of Oglethorpe county. He was born in Georgia, but in a settlement of Virginians. He married a Virginian and spent much time in that State. He was nominally a Georgian, but really a Virginian in all his sympathies. He had been an adherent of Mr. Crawford, but was somewhat of a free-lance in politics, and was brought out by the Clarke party, who had been defeated by Troup and Forsyth. He was opposed by Joel Crawford, but elected over him.
He came to his office in a troublous time, for it was during the gold mania. In a garden in the Nacoochee valley the spade of a workman had turned up a nugget of gold, and there was a discovery of rich deposits of the precious metal in other parts of Habersham county, and
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the discovery had brought into the up-country a vast horde of gold-seekers. The Indian country, in which white mer were not allowed permanent residence, was in this section of country, and the gold-seekers poured into it. The gov- ernor issued a proclamation commanding the intruders to depart; but " these paper bullets," he says, " had little in- fluence over a people who could not read."
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