Lumber City has had two advantages in its history that have kept it “on the map”. This small town (pop. 967) had easy access to the Ocmulgee River, and that fact drove its growth in the early years. Long before 1889, when it was incorporated and officially named Lumber City to recognize a busy sawmill’s impact on the community, the area saw the constant traffic of timber rafts running down to the coastal town of Darien, as well as cotton and grocery boats. Author Brainard Cheney (1900-1990), who was born in Fitzgerald and moved with his family to Lumber City in 1906, may be the town’s most famous citizen, though he’s largely forgotten today. An author who was associated with the Southern Agrarians, he wrote several books set on the Ocmulgee River, where he had been a raft hand as a young man in 1917, including River Rogue and Lightwood. Lumber City was the town nearest the confluence of the Ocmulgee and Oconee rivers, where the great Altamaha is formed and flows uninterrupted to the coast. Of course the railroad was a presence whose impact can’t be understated and it was inextricably linked to the sawmill.

In the modern era, Lumber City is located along one of Southeast Georgia’s busiest highways, US 341, and milling and timber-related industries continue to operate here. In the days before interstate highways, hotels and restaurants like the Ivy Lodge and the Red River Tea Room were popular with locals and travelers alike.

An interesting historical anecdote concerns John Renwick, namesake of Renwick Street in Lumber City. One of his descendants, Rosemary Morrison, has written to inform me of this connection: “John Renwick, from Peebles, Scotland, lived in Lumber City between 1890 and 1914, and his sister, Janet (Jenny) lived with him from 1902 until his death, afterwards returning alone to live in Lumber City until the late 1920s. A cousin, Robert Murray, came with him to Lumber City, and also lived there. He (or his brother) was a trainee architect.” She also notes that a Miss Knox from Lumber City sent her late Aunt Jenny a scrapbook in the 1950s, containing numerous photographs from the Renwicks’ time in Lumber City, focused primarily on structures around the town. Some of the houses designed and built by “Mr. Jock”, as Renwick was known locally, included those of the McGregor, McLeod, Martin, Murray, Knox, Vaughan, Thormhalen, Walter T. McArthur, and Capt. E. K. Willcox families.

In 2024, Lumber City was devastated, as was the entire region, by Hurricane Helene. Much cleanup has been done, but it will take a long time for everything to be normal again.