As always, one’s mind goes to many places, imagining the lives that must have been lived in an old homeplace like this one. Even in its abandonment, left to the elements, it still has a lot of stories to tell.
This easily overlooked landmark is actually a manufactured image, made for Hollywood, but nonetheless has become a symbol of the town for me.
As a work of art, it’s a grand interpretation of the folk art religious signs once found on fence posts and roadside messages once found throughout the American South.
The artist Joey Potter contacted me and said: I painted this mural on the train depot wall in the early 1980s when I was a scenic for cinema and stage…for the movies Stars and Bars and Home Fires Burning…
As the detail views attest, the mural is fading into oblivion.
The depot itself appears to be highly endangered, though the owner has placed a new roof on it, so there may be hope for its future. In The Courthouse and the Depot (Mercer University Press, Macon, 2002) Wilber W. Caldwell identifies it as a depot of the Georgia Railroad. The combination of the broad eaves, the gentle curve of the roof and the distinctive broken based pediment is unique to depots built on the Georgia Railroad in the 1880s and early 1890s.
The depot is posted so please do not attempt to trespass here.
Crawfordville Historic District, National Register of Historic Places
The gabled-ell or winged gable form is one of the most common of the vernacular house types of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in rural Georgia. Most of these originated as small central hallway or hall-and-parlor houses and were expanded as a family’s needs required more space.
This photo was made in 2015 and I believe it was on Nolan Store Road. I’m not sure if it was near the Nolan Plantation, though.
This schoolhouse looks to have been built in the 1950s or 1960s and has been abandoned for a long time. GHSBP confirms, and elaborates: …The school opened in 1954 as West Berrien Elementary, a consolidation of Jordan and New River elementary schools, and part of Berrien’s vast building program under the Minimum Foundation Program. West Berrien was renamed in 1988 to Northwest Elementary after taking in Enigma’s students. No gym was ever built on campus, so basketball teams continued to play home games in Enigma.
Northwest closed its doors in 1994, the year after a new middle school built to be a consolidated middle school opened in Nashville. One wing of Northwest was uprooted and moved to Nashville to be additional room at Berrien Primary School.
(Minimum Foundation helped fund schools throughout the state in the 1950s. Despite being built by different contracting firms, they all have a pretty similar look.)
I never get tired of finding these old houses, scattered around the landscape and holding on against the odds. This one is gone now but hung around a long time.
This building is located at the intersection of Greenway Cemetery Road [aka Davis Cemetery] and US Highway 319. Janice Godbee writes: This store was owned and operated by Mr. Robert Price, now deceased. His home was at one time to the left of the storefront. He had one son, James, and a daughter, Violet. As a young girl I remember the location very well and our families were great friends.
This house likely dates to the late 19th century. It was still standing as of January 2022.
I never get tired of finding houses like this because, more than any white-columned mansion, they represent the history that was reality for most Georgians a century ago .
An historic guide to Bleckley County published during the American bicentennial in 1976 identifies this as “One-room School House” and notes: This one-room school house was originally a part of the Bleckley County School System located on the Dublin Highway. It was later moved to its present location and used as a school for black children in the rural area. Though no formal name for the school is given in that document, the image matches the present structure. The name originally led me to believe it may have also been a church, but considering this information, Mae Chapel likely refers to an African-American church which was associated with the school.
It has been preserved by the Bleckley County Retired Educators Association as a representative rural schoolhouse and though a sign indicates that it’s a museum, it is not open to the public as far as I can tell.
The layout of this barn, particularly the front window, would suggest it had a commercial use or was the center of a very large farming operation.
Vanishing Georgia: Photographs by Brian Brown 