Thanks to John Robert Peavy for the identification. This has most recently served as the Oliver city hall.
Peoples Bank, Circa 1910, Oliver
Vanishing Georgia: Photographs by Brian Brown
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My father, William Sessel Waters, was born in Oliver in 1916 and attended the Oliver School until the family moved to Savannah in the early 1930’s. He remembered that ice cream, packed in salt and ice was delivered from Savannah by train every Saturday. The game played by the young boys was to see who could hold their big toe under the salt water the longest as the barrels were drained.
This early 20th Century bank building is now the City Hall and Police Department; built during the City of Oliver’s heyday, circa 1910, this was the People’s Bank (I don’t yet have the exact year of construction). The date of 1790 refers to the earliest beginning of community here, the founding of the Little Ogeechee Baptist Church (LOBC) congregation.
The coming of the railroad here in 1839 brought about area prosperity and the naming of the community after one of the owner’s of the largest two area properties through which the Central Railroad and Banking Company of Georgia brought the railroad (George OLIVER and Lewis LANIER). The railroad’s milepost 46/whistle stop depot 4 1/2 became Oliver, Screven County, Georgia. George OLIVER eventually sold land to the LUFBURROW Family, which divided it into town lots. Village/town status came in 1885, reputedly (just before the building of the current LUFBURROW “mansion”).
In December 1864, Gen. Sherman “borrowed,” for a couple of nights, the LUFFBURROW home (now gone), then headed toward Savannah. The departing troops, who had corralled horses and stock in the LOBC cemetery, took some and killed the remainder for the pillaged townspeople to dispose of. Between the corralling and the necessary fires to dispose of the carcasses, few stone markers remained and none of the wooden. Incidentally, the valuable survey work of the DAR ladies in the 1950s provide identification of older LOBCC stones which are almost unreadable today, a weathering process which continues (see FindAGrave for the 500+ known burials there now, the oldest extant stones provide the community surnames, a sort of history of the townspeople, Baptists, Methodists and otherwise).
The present LOBC structure is its fourth, having been built in 1912. The Methodist Church congregation (the one which has the, surprising to many, Christian symbol of the Star of David at the top of its large windows) originated in either 1899 or 1907 (newspaper accounts of the annual Methodist Conference meetings will help me with that), the land was acquired in 1908, and its building was also in 1912, the year that the City of Oliver installed its first mayor (the local physician, Dr. Howard Emerson EZELL). The Oliver School House was erected in 1910; the School House was razed about 2007 or so.
(Repetitive from my prior posts? I’ve shared some of these details before, but I’ve no other way to correct, edit, “fine-tune,” &c. the evident facts, so it may happen yet again.)
May God Bless You and Your Family, Robert
I grew up in this small town and had an amazing childhood here. Thanks for sharing!
It was 1963 when I accepted Jesus as my savior in that little white church in Oliver ga.I was 13 years old,what precious memories. Winnette Kersey Moore