This is likely one of the older houses in Reidsville. I was sure it was about to be leveled when I photographed it in 2023 but it was still standing last year. It was located near the hospital and a public housing development. I’d love to know more about it.
Reidsville High School was built circa 1926 to replace an earlier facility (pictured below), which was lost to fire in 1925.
The earlier school was a 6-teacher school and was considered the best such facility in Tattnall County. The educational survey noted that it was valued at $16,000, was surrounded by five acres and school gardens, and featured indoor “sanitary toilets”. In addition to classrooms, there was an auditorium, a domestic science room, and a music room. Though the Reidsville school was lost to fire, the Glennville High School, of the same era, still survives.
Reidsville High School was quite typical of schools built from the late 1910s until World War II. The original brick siding was covered with stucco during a restoration. [Stuccoing was seen as an affordable way to “modernize” buildings at one time, but is actually an unfortunate choice. The stucco is non-historic and greatly detracts from the intended architectural presence.] The facility remains in use, though not as a high school.
The Georgia State Prison at Reidsville was open from 1937 until 2022. The main building, seen above, was the work of the Atlanta architectural firm of Tucker & Howell in the Stripped Classical style and was completed in late 1936 but not occupied until 1937. It cost $1.5 million and was funded by the Public Works Administration, a New Deal agency. One wall of the structure features an idealistic frieze with sculptures of various men at work by famed sculptor Julian Harris entitled “Rehabilitation”. The prison was built at a time when Southern prisons and chain gangs were coming under serious criticism in the national press and by Congress for their poor conditions. Robert Elliott Burns’s bestselling book I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!, published in 1932, put a particularly unwelcome focus on Georgia. The reforms that followed were an ongoing process, and were fully embraced by Governor Ellis Arnall in 1942. As the state’s crime rate grew rapidly along with the population, more structures were added. The Rogers State Prison is located near the closed Georgia State Prison, as is the prison cemetery.
According to Tattnall County: “The Georgia General Assembly passed a law on August 16, 1924 that abolished hanging for all capital crimes. From that point forward, instead of being hanged by the sheriff of the county or judicial circuit where their crimes had occurred, the condemned were to be electrocuted at the Georgia State Prison at Milledgeville. During that year an electric chair was installed in the prison, and the first execution in that method occurred on September 13, 1924.“
“On January 1, 1938 the execution chamber was relocated to the new Georgia State Prison at Reidsville. In the 1940s and 1950s, volunteers were offered $25 to flip the switches which would start the flow of electricity and eventually lead to the death of the prisoner. Executions were moved to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison near Jackson, in Butts County, in June 1980. The state’s old electric chair can still be found in the museum on the upper floors of the main building, as well as prison documents containing names, authorizations and last statements of the prisoners.“
“Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was transferred from the DeKalb County Jail in Decatur, Georgia, to Georgia State Prison in Reidsville, Georgia. He was released on October 27, 1960 on a $2,000 bond [after intervention by John F. Kennedy]. GSP also housed radical activist H. Rap Brown, now known as Jamil Al-Amin. Al-Amin was the chairman of SNCC in the late 1960s. In 2007, he was transferred to a federal facility where he now resides. The facility also housed notorious Atlanta killer Wayne Williams.”
Georgia State Prison was also the site of the execution of Lena Barker, the only woman to face the death penalty in the state in the modern era. Baker was later exonerated.
The Longest Yard, a popular movie starring Burt Reynolds and Eddie Albert, was filmed at the prison.
The Tattnall Bank Building is the the most distinctive commercial structure remaining in Reidsville. The bank was founded in 1900 and closed in 2009.
Zachary (1850-1930) and Mary Jane Nelson Smith (1857-1924) moved from North Carolina to the Shiloh community outside Reidsville in 1893 They first operated a hotel on this location in 1905, but it was lost to fire soon thereafter. They rebuilt the present structure on the same site in 1908. Their in-laws, the Nelson family, moved to Reidsville in 1913 and assumed management of the hotel. It’s known simply as the Nelson Hotel today and most recently served as a bed and breakfast inn. It’s presently for sale.
National Register of Historic Places
There are several historic outbuildings on the property of the Alexander Hotel. A sign indicates that this is the old post office from the Altamaha community.
At his wife’s suggestion, Dr. Orlando L. Alexander (1852-1920) built this Queen Anne-inspired hotel, where the couple kept a residence, as well. Dr. Alexander was a local physician who received his medical schooling at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He served on a statewide medical conference in 1905. The hotel was built by D. J. Nobles, a master carpenter from Hagan, Georgia, who was responsible for as many as 25 structures in the general area; it was the first location in Tattnall County to have electricity and the first to have telephone service.
National Register of Historic Places
I’m trying to locate a history of this magnificent survivor. It’s located on land that’s recently been clear-cut, near Reidsville. There is no public access to the house but I was able to photograph it from a nearby road, thanks to a long lens. From what I can discern, it’s a large I-House (or Plantation Plain) with double the normal depth for that style in this area. Most likely, it was built just before or just after the Civil War.
Designed by J. W. Golucke, Georgia’s leading courthouse architect, this structure was greatly modified in 1961. It originally featured a clock tower and mansard roof. It remains one of the more unique courthouses in the state.
National Register of Historic Places
The Georgia State Prison Cemetery is a part of the Rogers State Prison complex near Reidsville. It is a stark reminder of the realities of crime and isolation these men brought upon their lives, and the fact that the crosses are numbered with no names is striking.
This marker, provided by inmates on 1 July 1972, notes: “The first interment was on December 20, 1937. The state provides a Christian burial for all deceased inmates for whom private or family burial arrangements are not available.”
For many years, Reidsville was known as the home of Georgia’s electric chair, so I suspect some of these interments are of men who were executed for heinous crimes. There are nearly 700 graves located here.