The Center for a Better South
You can’t miss this sign in Dudley, Ga., that VanishingSouthGeorgia.com Brian Brown calls “Roadside Religion.”
Better South President Andy Brack remembers Dudley as a home to a great aunt who passed away a few years back. Dudley, home to fewer than 500 people, is in Laurens County in the middle of Georgia. Some 23.6 percent of residents of Laurens County (population 48,434) live in poverty.
Photo taken in August 2013 by Brian Brown. All rights reserved.
This is an old precinct house in the rural area of Minter, Ga., in Laurens County. Like many public structures in the area, it’s built of granitoid, writes VanishingSouthGeorgia.com photographer Brian Brown, who took the photo in August 2013. See another photo.
More than likely, this is the Oconee Voting Precinct on Minter Tweed Road. It’s probably still being used as a polling location as evidenced by the instructions for electronic voting on the table. Regardless, it’s certainly a relic of our rural past — a place that used to have wooden ballot boxes for paper ballots.
Laurens County, population 48,434, is in the middle of Georgia between Macon and Savannah on Interstate 16. Its county seat is Dublin, population 16,201. Thirty-six percent of Laurens County residents are black; 23.6 percent of the county’s residents live in poverty. Dublin, however, has a majority black population (57.6 percent) and 31.9 percent of residents live in poverty, according to Census data.
Photo by Brian Brown. All rights reserved.
VanishingSouthGeorgia.com photographer Brian Brown likes the hand-painted sign on this door of this old building in Emmalane, about four miles southwest of Millen, Ga.: “L.P. Mons, Well Driller.”
“There are lots of cotton farms in this area off the Old Savannah Highway south of Millen. In fact, the oldest cotton farm in America (Juanita M. Joiner Farm) and the oldest timberland company (Southern Woodland Company) are operated by the 8th generation of the family on lands dating to 1783.This relic, located in the vicinity of the farm, probably served the now-forgotten community of Emmalane as a general store or commissary.”
Jenkins County, whose county seat is Millen, was home to 9,213 people, according to the U.S. Census in 2012, an increase of 10 percent from two years earlier. Almost 30 percent of residents live in poverty.
Photo by Brian Brown, 2013. All rights reserved.
VanishingSouthGeorgia.com photographer Brian Brown sent along this typical Georgia country scene about four miles southwest of Millen — an old Victorian farmhouse surrounded by silos, farm implements, dirt roads and mud puddles.
Remind you a little bit of some of the descriptions of eastern Georgia from Tobacco Road (1932) author Erskine Caldwell? Nearby on Brown’s photoblog, you can find other neat stuff around the Emmalane community: Brinson’s Bar-B-Que (“a well-loved institution in Jenkins County … three slices, of Sunbeam bread, a generous helping of potato salad and Brinson’s sweet tea complete this classic Southern meal”), Skull Creek Baptist Church and an old general store.
Jenkins County, whose county seat is Millen, was home to 9,213 people, according to the U.S. Census in 2012, an increase of 10 percent from two years earlier. Almost 30 percent of residents live in poverty.
Photo by Brian Brown, 2013. All rights reserved.
The bright color and mural on this car wash in Millen, Ga., caught the discerning eye of VanishingSouthGeorgia.com photographer Brian Brown.
Millen, which had a population of 3,492 in 2000, is the county seat of Jenkins County, which was home to 9,213 people, according to the U.S. Census in 2012, an increase of 10 percent from two years earlier. Almost 30 percent of residents live in poverty.
Photo by Brian Brown, 2013. All rights reserved.
VanishingSouthGeorgia.com photographer Brian Brown writes that this old Neoclassical Revival home is currently for sale in Millen in eastern Georgia. The house, said to have been built in 1892-93 and named the “Joseph and Lucinda Applewhite House,” reportedly did not have the columns when originally built in the Queen Anne style. The columns were said to have been added in the 1980s during a renovation.
One person who saw the photo of the home in Millen, which had a population of 3,492 in 2000, wrote, “There’s nothing lonelier than an abandoned house. Oh, the memories that were made there.”
Millen is the county seat of Jenkins County, which was home to 9,213 people, according to the U.S. Census in 2012, an increase of 10 percent from two years earlier. Almost 30 percent of residents live in poverty.
Photo by Brian Brown, 2013. All rights reserved.
The historic Carswell Grove Baptist Church, pictured above, about 10 miles northwest of Millen, Ga., has a complicated history, writes Georgia photographer Brian Brown in this post on VanishingSouthGeorgia.com. The current church building, now on the National Register of Historic Places, was constructed in 1919 after a lynch mob burned down its predecessor during a time of racial violence that was known as “Red Summer.”
According to an excerpt of an article in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, the church had one of the largest black congregations in eastern Georgia in 1919. An April 13 of that year as hundreds gathered to celebrate its founding, an altercation broke out after two white police officers arrived. Both police officers and a black man were killed. Another man, Joe Ruffin, was severely wounded. According to the story, which writer Cameron McWhirter published as a book in 2011(Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America):
“A white mob quickly formed and went on a rampage. The mob burned the church down, then killed two of Ruffin’s sons—one of them a thirteen-year-old. Rioters threw the bodies in the flames, then spread out through the area, burning black lodges, churches, and cars. They killed several other people; no one knows how many. The wounded Joe Ruffin was saved from the lynch mob only because a white county commissioner drove him at high speed to the nearest big city, Augusta, and put him in the county jail there.”
Brown said efforts were ongoing to preserve and stabilize the current church structure.
Jenkins County, whose county seat is Millen, was home to 9,213 people, according to the U.S. Census in 2012, an increase of 10 percent from two years earlier. Almost 30 percent of residents live in poverty.
Photo by Brian Brown, 2013. All rights reserved.
From Better South President Andy Brack:
My Great Uncle Gordon Brack used to be a clerk in this store in Allentown in rural Wilkinson County, Georgia, where my father was a boy. Thanks to Brian Brown of the Vanishing South Georgia project for letting us republish the photo.
My dad, Elliott Brack, recalls the store in the 1940s:
“We used to buy soft drinks for five cents out of a cooler chilled by ice, pulling the drinks out of the cold water. If we had another nickel, we would buy peanuts and pour them into the Coke or RC or Pepsi for added pleasure.”
Dad says the store had a butcher and a meat market. “Items were on shelves and you told them you wanted something and the counterman reached up and got it. No self-self service much. They were general merchandise, which meant they sold feed and overalls too.”
Brown notes in his post about the store that Allentown is known for being at the intersection of four Georgia counties, although it mostly is in Wilkinson County.
Today, Wilkinson County has fewer people (9,577 in the 2012 Census estimate) than it did in the 1940s (11,025 people) when my dad was a boy here before moving to the “big city” of Macon with his family. About three in five people are white, with most of the rest being black. Poverty is about 20 percent.
Copyrighted photo by Brian Brown. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Vanishing South Georgia photographer Brian Brown offers this 2010 Pepsi image from Bartow, Ga. The photo serves to balance an earlier post of a Coca Cola advertising mural in Mount Vernon, Ga., which is about an hour south.
“The mural at Bartow is on a building that was once a thriving local grocery store,” Brown says. “Bartow has always been a small town, with a scattering of churches and businesses, but as is the case in so many of these places, all that remains is the advertising to even suggest that it was once a gathering place.”
Bartow (population 286) is in Jefferson County, a Crescent county with an estimated 16,432 people in 2012. Some 54 percent of residents are black, with almost all of the remaining people in the rural county being white. About 29 percent of people live in poverty.
2010 photo, copyrighted by Brian Brown. All rights reserved.
Vanishing South Georgia photographer Brian Brown offers this photo of a pedestrian walking down a Lumber City, Ga., street that has a medical clinic behind the bright red doors.
Lumber City has about 1,300 people, a third of whom live in poverty. It’s on the eastern tip of Telfair County, which as 16,349 people, according to the 2012 Census estimate. Just over 60 percent of residents are white. About 36 percent are black. About 13 percent of people consider themselves to be Hispanic or Latino. As with Lumber City, a third of the county’s population lives in poverty.
2012 copyrighted photo by Brian Brown. All rights reserved.