This unusual hip-roof farmhouse is located east of Johnstonville, near the Monroe County line. It’s a style I’ve seen a few times, but one I would consider very uncommon. Two large trees have recently fallen on the property but luckily the house was spared.
Though a photograph of this house is not included in the National Register nomination for the Johnstonville-Goggins Historic District, another smaller tenant house very close to this location is documented.
Johnstonville-Goggins Historic District, National Register of Historic Places
This congregation dates to circa 1846. Original members were Jesse B. Carroll, Wright Manning, Robert Ridley, Jr., Robert Ridley, Sr., Isaac Stinson, John Williams. There were also two schools in the Clear Creek District as late as 1917. I’m not able to locate a date for the “two-entrance” church building, but it’s probably a hundred years old at least.
Ever since coming across a small colony of these in a swamp when I was a boy, I have always loved Cardinal Flower (Lobelia cardinalis). Their tall scarlet spikes make them one of our most beautiful wildflowers. They grow all over Georgia, in moist, mostly shaded environments.
I just love this lonely old barn in Gilmer County. I don’t remember exactly where it was located but I think it was somewhere on Georgia Highway 52, between Amicalola and Cartecay.
I was looking for the old Tibet voting precinct when I saw this. It’s a great old vernacular house of a style once very common near the coast but quickly vanishing. A post office at Tibet [prounounced tib-it, not tuh-bet] operated from 1900-1914. It was located in Liberty County until the establishment of Long County in 1920. The name may have originated with a plantation but by the time it had a post office, it was likely a turpentine village.
Though it’s most recently been in the news for the nearby discovery of human remains, Portal Hunting Club won’t be becoming a macabre tourist attraction anytime soon. In fact, it’s not easily located and the members like it that way. On the edge of the thick and foreboding Bulltown Swamp, where Long, McIntosh, and Liberty counties meet, this cinderblock clubhouse has been home to the Portal Hunting Club since 1956, but the club has much earlier origins. [The clubhouse itself is just inside Long County]. It was established by men from Portal, a little town west of Statesboro. According to a great article about the club by Angus McCleod in Georgia Outdoor News, it’s the oldest hunting club in Georgia.
He writes: …The club was established back in the late 1800s. There were few or no deer in Bulloch County back then, so a group of hunters from Portal learned they could lease land in the corner of McIntosh, Liberty and Long counties to deer hunt.
Twice a year the men would load up their wagons, saddle their horses and bring their hounds and bird dogs for the two-day trip to Bull Town Swamp. The hunters would camp one night en route. The bird dogs would hunt along the way, and if one pointed to a covey of quail, the hunters would shoot. If a hound jumped a rabbit and someone shot it, they would have quail and rabbit for supper.
The members of Portal have hunted the property for about 110 years. They are believed to be the oldest, still-functioning hunting club in Georgia. However, there were two years during World War II when the club was closed. The Army was using the woods in and around Bull Town Swamp as training grounds. Of course they were using much of Long and McIntosh counties to train our troops. During those two years, the Army blew up the old barn that used to house the hunters.
After World War II, the Portal Hunting Club members leased an old home off Sandy Run Road in Liberty County. It was an old farm house with newspaper on the wall for insulation. A potbelly stove provided the only heat. It was a proud day in 1956 when the hunters moved into the existing clubhouse.
Besides the large country kitchen and the comfortable main rooms, Portal has two bathrooms and four sleeping rooms — very much like an old Army barracks where everyone sleeps in an open room with bunk beds...
Make sure to read Angus’s article. He details a fascinating custom of the club you’ll find interesting, I believe.
I’ve nearly completed my edits of counties north of the Fall Line, and am exploring my extensive South Georgia files now. This house stands out in my mind from many travels in Pierce County. The photo dates to 2017, so it may be gone by now. I believe it was at Mershon.
Scott Thompson writes: This was actually a store. The owners lived in the back of this building. There was a very similar building adjacent to this one that was also a little store. It was torn down a few years ago.
This is located on an otherwise empty lot across Hyers Street from the old educational complex. I don’t know anything about it, but I’m sharing it because I like barns and shed, and especially when they’re sided in red “tar paper” or more properly, false brick siding. William Christenberry‘s photograph “Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama” is one of the images that inspired me to begin this project 15 years ago.
Sapelo residents and natives disembarking the ferry Katie Underwood with tourists, 2012.
One of the first things the late Cornelia Walker Bailey told me in 2012 when I met her on my first of many trips to Sapelo Island was that she had seen plans dating back to the late 1960s to build a causeway from mainland McIntosh County to the island her people had inhabited for nearly 200 years. She told me she was glad I could see her island but I could tell she was on the fence about tourism to the island. On one hand, it was a source of income for her family, but it wasn’t that simple, she said. Cornelia was the resident griot, or storyteller, of Sapelo and she was very protective of this magical place. Her book God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man was my guide to understanding a little about the place I was lucky enough to visit, thanks to the generosity of my late friend Sonny DeSoto. Very few people have been to this isolated enclave of Geechee culture and if you are lucky enough to have been, you have an immediate appreciation and understanding of the need to keep it as it has always been. It’s magical in its isolation, its lack of modern convenience, and most of all, in the spirit of the people.
I don’t know about any causeway plans as of this moment, but what I do know is that the McIntosh County Commission has been raising property taxes for at least the last 8 years, creating a hardship for the community of Hogg Hummock [aka Hog Hammock] and while people on and off the island have been protesting this, it’s fallen on deaf ears. The exorbitant property valuations have coincided with the building of large modern vacation homes, interspersed among the small vernacular cottages that have defined the community over time. The desire now, and what the commission just approved by a vote of 3-2, is for many more of these unwelcome homes to be built by the wealthy few who can afford them. With values of the majority of these properties sure to be north of a million dollars, the taxes for people on the island will only get higher and therefore untenable. A real concern is that the county will eventually condemn properties for those longtime residents who can’t meet the growing tax burden and flip those properties to eager developers who care nothing about the history of this place. Only time will tell.
The people of Sapelo are very independent and very resourceful, but this is a problem that those skills may not be able to solve. I understand that part of this is due to the fact that descendants and heirs are willingly selling their property here, so that has to be considered, but to those who wish to remain here, not in the shadow of some short-term-rental McMansion, there should be a covenant that allows them to pay the rates of taxes they’ve always paid. Ultimately, no development would be the ideal scenario, but short of stopping that, which seems impossible now, there must be a compromise. Please share your thoughts with the McIntosh County Commission, or even the Governor’s Office, if you’re so inclined. Apparently, the governor spends time on the island, so I’m sure he’s aware of these issues.
Structures of this nature, even when used as a primary residence, are referred to as garage apartments, and were considered very modern in the 1920s and 1930s, the height of their popularity. Variations are still being built today. They featured a garage on the lower level and an apartment, usually a bedroom, bathroom, and combined living area and kitchen on the upper level. Since most were part of properties that featured a primary residence, they were often rental properties. In a sense, they were the carriage houses of the early automobile era. Surviving examples are often still used for rental income or as guest houses.
