Tag Archives: Famous Georgians

Georgia State Prison, 1937, Reidsville

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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.

Sugar Ray Robinson Childhood Home, Circa 1910s, Ailey

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During the 1920s, this board-and-batten single-pen cottage was the childhood home of one of America’s most famous athletes. Born on 3 May 1921 to Walker Smith, Sr., a Dublin, Georgia, native, and Leila Hurst, from Johnson County, Walker Smith, Jr., came to be known as Sugar Ray Robinson and went on to worldwide fame and fortune. According to his autobiography, his father, who worked as a farm laborer, eventually moved the family to Detroit in search of better opportunity. The Smiths had two daughters, as well. The couple separated in the early 1930s, but may not have divorced. Walker Smith, Sr., was buried in Detroit and Leila Smith in Westchester County, New York. In Sugar Ray, Robinson’s posthumous autobiography published in 1994, he notes that the family moved to New York City around this time. [There is some conflict with dates and facts in the autobiography and Robinson’s official website, though they are trivial.]

Original Jan 30 1947 Sugar Ray Robinson Welterweight Champion Boxing Wire Photo, Acme Newsphotos. Public domain.

Smith dropped out of high school in ninth grade and though he initially wanted to be a doctor became fascinated by boxing. When he was turned away from entering his first match at age 14 because he was too young to be a member of the Amateur Athletic Union, he used the identification card of a friend at the gym, Ray Robinson, and that name stuck. He told Time magazine in a 1951 cover story (“Businessman Boxer”, 25 June 1951) that a woman attending a fight in Watertown, New York, said he was “sweet as sugar”, and the name Sugar Ray Robinson was born. He turned pro in 1940 and compiled a record of 129-1-2 with 85 knockouts. He held numerous titles and is widely regarded as the greatest boxer of all time, pound-for-pound.

His first marriage, to Marjorie Joseph in 1938, was short-lived and was annulled the same year. They had a son, Ronnie Smith. Robinson married Edna Mae Holly (1915-2002), who was a dancer at Harlem’s famous Cotton Club, in 1943 or 1944. They had one child, Ray Robinson, Jr. but the couple divorced in 1962. He later married Mildred “Millie” Wiggins Bruce, in 1965, and the couple moved to Los Angeles. He faced many health issues in his final years, suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease and diabetes, and died on 12 April 1989.

A personal note: I’ve been trying to “find this house” for as long I’ve known of its existence, but wasn’t able to pinpoint the location for various reasons. After seeing it positively identified by friends at Ethos Preservation in Savannah, I realized I already had photographs and just didn’t know it was “the” house. I understand there are no plans for preservation at this time, and while the house is in relatively good condition, it should at least have an historic marker denoting its significance. I believe it would be of interest to tourists and boxing fans and perhaps in a perfect world would be a small museum honoring the career of this native son.

Flipper Cemetery, Thomasville

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This cemetery, now commonly referred to as the Flipper Cemetery, is one of the oldest municipal burial grounds for African-Americans in Thomasville. Also known as the old Magnolia Cemetery, it’s distinguished by methodical plantings of oaks and other shade trees and is a well-maintained historical resource.

Flipper Family plot

Significantly, it’s the final resting place of Lt. Henry Ossian Flipper, the first Black graduate of West Point. Lt. Flipper died in Atlanta in 1940 and was buried in South View Cemetery. In February 1978, his remains were exhumed and he was re-interred in his hometown.

Rev. Jacob Wade (?-1873)

But it is also important for the numerous other prominent Black citizens of 19th-century Thomasville, including Rev. Jacob Wade, the first pastor of the African Baptist Church. Additionally, there are a few important vernacular monuments present, most importantly the three crosses and the Ruis obelisk. There are also quite a few typical Victorian and early-20th century memorials.

Cross monuments of Dall Mitchell, Violet Mitchell, foreground; Benetta Lowry?, right.

The birth and death dates are unknown, and with Dall Mitchell and Benetta Lowry, the names are not certain. Those two crosses have been repaired and it’s possible that information was lost. They are quite unusual and vernacular landmarks.

Benetta Lowry? cross monument

This shows the loss of part of the letters from the original monument, which was obviously taller than it is in its present configuration, and the challenge of identification.

Ruis-Wiggs obelisk

The Ruis-Wiggs obelisk is a concrete vernacular copy of other monuments common at the time, usually accomplished in marble or granite.

Marget (Margaret) Ruis (1889-1929)

Margaret and Mattie Ruis (1859 or 1869-1911) are memorialized on the obelisk, as well as Shep W. Wiggs (birth and death dates indiscernible).

There are numerous brick grave markers like the one seen above. Most do not identify the decedent and therefore present a great challenge for identification.

Kate Stewart (16 June 1885- 9 April 1886)

This is one of several damaged memorials in Flipper Cemetery that have been repaired.

Ezekiel Hambleton (19 October 1842-9 October 1892)

The presence of so many manufactured headstones in a Black cemetery of this era is an indication of a thriving and growing Black middle class.

Sophia James (4 July 1860-15 March 1883)

It appears, considering all the broken memorials, that the cemetery was once very poorly maintained, but thankfully, someone took the time and care to repair nearly all of the damaged stones.

Flipper Family plot

Also buried within the family plot, along with Lt. Henry O. Flipper, are his parents, J. Festus Flipper (1832-12 December 1918) and Isabella Buckhalter Flipper (1837-21 August 1887).

Evergreen Congregational Church, 1928, & School, 1911, Beachton

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Now known as Evergreen United Church of Christ, this historic congregation was established in 1903 with the assistance of the American Missionary Association, an arm of the United Church of Christ focused on the construction and support of schools for Black children in the South. Under the leadership of Jerry Walden, Jr., a group of men in the Beachton community formed the Evergreen Congregational Church and built a wood-frame schoolhouse on land donated by Please Hawthorne. A frame church was built adjacent to the school in 1904. Rev. William H. Holloway, the first pastor, served until 1911.

The present school building was constructed in 1911 and renamed the Grady County Training School. It featured classrooms downstairs and residences for teachers upstairs and was designed by James E. Wright, Sr., of Thomasville, one of Georgia’s first professional Black architects. According to the Jack Hadley Black History Museum: “James Ernest Wright, Sr., (1887-1972), was the first African American architect in Thomasville, Georgia. He received his degree in architecture and brick masonry from the Tuskegee Institute during the tenure of Booker T. Washington. When he arrived in Thomasville in 1916, he drew plans for Mount Olive Primitive Baptist Church and helped build the barns at Pebble Hill Plantation.”

The old wooden church was demolished in 1925 and the present structure completed in 1928. Andrew Young, one of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, served as Evergreen’s pastor from 1957-1959, and wrote in his autobiography that the lessons he learned at Evergreen served him during the struggle for Civil Rights.

National Register of Historic Places

Paul Anderson Memorial Park, 2008, Toccoa

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One of the highlights of downtown Toccoa is Paul Anderson Park, a welcoming greenspace nestled at the intersection of Georgia Highway 17 and Tugalo Street, heading south out of town. It’s a moving tribute to Toccoa’s most famous resident, Paul Anderson (1932-1994). Anyone who’s ever flipped through a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records knows that he made the “Greatest Lift. The Greatest Weight Ever Raised by a Human Being…6,270lbs in a back lift.” This led to Anderson being known as the strongest man in the world. He was a national and world heavyweight champion and won a gold medal at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, but was proudest of his youth home in Vidalia. The home, founded by Paul and his wife, Glenda, “works with juveniles who would otherwise be incarcerated. The young men are first and foremost taught about the saving grace and enduring love of Jesus Christ. The Paul Anderson Youth Home, located on a 50- acre campus, offers to its students the opportunity of completing their education at the Home’s accredited high school which more than adequately prepares the young men for college, vocational school, or a career in the military. Paul believed that if a troubled boy learned to love himself rather than striking out at others that he would instead reach out to help others. And Paul Anderson also strove to instill in each boy a strong work ethic.”

The park was originally the idea of Mrs. Cynthia Sanders’s fourth grade gifted class, in 1999. Students presented the idea of a park to the city commission, which adopted the suggestion the same year. It was dedicated in 2008. Jim A. Pollock was the landscape architect and the excellent statue is the work of renowned sculptor Jerry McKenna.

Nancy Hart Cabin, Elbert County

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Just past the group shelter as you approach the cabin, you’ll see this marker, noting the location of a spring on Nancy Hart’s property at Wahachee Creek. It was erected by the New Deal Works Progress Administration and the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1936, as part of ongoing work inside the Nancy Hart park.

Though to my knowledge she never made a flag, Nancy Hart (c.1735-1830) is the Georgia equivalent to Betsy Ross, in the sense that she’s the best known woman of the Revolutionary War era in the state. As a spy and combatant, she far exceeded the expectations of her gender at the time. She’s also the only woman to be the namesake of a county in Georgia; nearby Hart County was so named in 1853. The city of Hartwell, and Lake Hartwell also bear her name. At the outset of the Civil War, a group of wives of Confederate soldiers in LaGrange formed a militia group to protect the home front and called themselves the Nancy Harts.

Though details about her life are varied and sometimes in conflict, most historians believe Nancy Hart was born Nancy Ann Morgan in the Yadkin River Valley of North Carolina circa 1735. She was a cousin of Daniel Morgan, who commanded a successful American force at the Battle of Cowpens. She married Lieut. Benjamin Hart (1732-1802), himself a relative of Thomas Hart Benton and Henry Clay. Her family came to the Broad River Valley of Georgia in the early 1770s, just as tensions between Tories, English soldiers and other British sympathizers were coming to a head. As to her personal qualities, Clay Ouzts writes: “…Aunt Nancy,” as she was often called, was a tall, gangly woman who towered six feet in height. Like the frontier she inhabited, she was rough-hewn and rawboned, with red hair and a smallpox-scarred face. She was also cross-eyed. One early account pointed out that Hart had “no share of beauty—a fact she herself would have readily acknowledged, had she ever enjoyed an opportunity of looking into a mirror.” And, her “physical appearance was matched by a feisty personal demeanor characterized by a hotheaded temper, a fearless spirit, and a penchant for exacting vengeance upon those who offended her or harmed her family and friends. Local Indians soon began to refer to her as “Wahatche,” which may have meant war woman“.”

The greatest legend about Nancy Hart was that she killed six Tories who had come to her cabin looking for a patriot (Whig) leader whom she’d just help escape. Details of the event have emerged as fact and folklore, but the story goes that the Tories killed one of her turkeys, ordered her to prepare it and feed it to them, and became drunk on the wine she served. After killing two of them with their own weapons, she held the others captive while reinforcements were gathered. The survivors were then hung from a nearby tree. Some proof of this may have been uncovered, literally, when railroad crews unearthed six human skeletons near the site of the original cabin, in 1912.

A bronze plaque notes that this replica of Nancy Hart’s cabin was built by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1932, at the approximate site of the original and using some of the original bricks in the chimney.

After the war, Nancy became quite religious, later moved to Brunswick and upon Benjamin’s death in 1802, returned to her Broad River homesite, which had at some point flooded and washed away the cabin. After briefly residing in Athens with her son, John Hart, they settled near relatives in Henderson County, Kentucky, where Nancy spent the rest of her life.

I’m glad that such a fascinating character in Georgia history is remembered. There may be as many myths as truths in her story, but she certainly embodies the spirit of resistance that flowered in Georgia during the Revolutionary War.

Phoenix Academy: The Joel Chandler Harris Schoolhouse

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This is the enigmatic Phoenix Academy, where Joel Chandler Harris attended school as a young man while working as a print devil for famed plantation publisher Joseph Addison Turner (1826-1868). It was saved and relocated to its present location in the mid-1970s by an Atlanta architect who owned the surrounding property, itself an historic antebellum plantation. More about that after a little background.

PLEASE NOTE: This property is not publicly accessible and trespassing is closely monitored by multiple means.

Phoenix Academy was built in the vicinity of Turnwold, northeast of Eatonton, circa 1860. The area is historically identified as Phoenix on maps. The house known as Turnwold today, the Lane-Turner House, was actually one of two on a large working plantation, the other being the older Alexander-Turner House. Joseph Addison Turner, published The Countryman, a weekly newspaper, from his property, the Alexander-Turner House. The Countryman was the only periodical ever published from a plantation during the Civil War and was widely read throughout the confederacy. His brother, William Wilberforce Turner (1830-1879), who lived in the Lane-Turner House, came up with the Turnwold name for the plantation, according to the National Register of Historic Places, and Joseph like it so much he applied to the entire property. (Turnwold means “Turner’s field”).

Union Academy, built circa 1820 by William Turner (1787-1853), the patriarch of the Turner family, originally stood on the site, but it was lost to fire*. Some time later, Phoenix Academy was built in its place. William Howard Seward, who served as Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, was an early rector at Union Academy. Joseph Addison Turner taught and served as president of the board of trustees for Phoenix Academy. He saw promise in a young, poorly educated Joel Chandler Harris, and encouraged him to attend school in the mornings while he apprenticed as a print devil for The Countryman in the afternoons. From his experiences among the enslaved people at Turnwold flowed Harris’s inspiration for the Uncle Remus stories. Though the Uncle Remus canon faded from popularity long before justified modern academic and social debates about controversial topics arose, mostly due to their rural subject matter and stereotypical portrayal of African-Americans, Harris remains a foundational figure in the history of Southern literature, if for no other reason than preserving the lost language of the enslaved and for his firsthand accounts of plantation life. A recent study found: Generations of Putnam County’s children, both black and white, have grown up with Harris, Remus, and Br’er Rabbit looming in the background of their lives. Yet in an age when the Harris books have fallen out of favor and Disney has permanently shelved the 1948 film version, nearly 100% of Putnam’s students engaged in this project acknowledge having never previously read a single Uncle Remus story.

*- (The date of the fire, and of the construction of Phoenix academy, is unclear; the National Register dates it to circa 1862 but also describes it as “antebellum”. I believe it may date to earlier in the 1850s and was assigned the 1862 date due to the Joel Chandler Harris association. The National Register also notes: “Over the years as the student body grew, a larger structure was constructed alongside the academy. The original Phoenix Academy became the headmaster’s residence until the academy’s closing, when it became a tenant residence. The second Phoenix School was torn down approximately ten years ago (c. 1965). Like many rural schoolhouses of the period, Phoenix Academy is of the Greek Revival style. It exhibits a pediment, pilasters with Ionic-order scrolls and molding around the door and window frames. The unusually fine application of Greek Revival details to one of the few surviving examples of rural antebellum academies in Georgia makes Phoenix Academy a unique and noteworthy structure.”).

Now, back to the story of how Phoenix Academy wound up clear across Putnam County. It’s all due to the foresight of architect and preservationist Earl McMillen, Jr. (1938-2007), who practiced in Atlanta and purchased the historic Singleton Plantation in 1968. When McMillen learned of the imminent demolition of the schoolhouse circa 1975, he acquired it from Putnam County and brought it to his property, where he painstakingly put it back together, just as it had originally stood. Its connection to Joel Chandler Harris was too important to be lost, McMillen rightfully believed. He did remove a rear wing, which had been added later in its history. It was used a rural schoolhouse well into the 20th century for children who lived in the area of Turnwold. An early 1900s photograph of Phoenix School, which the old academy was known as by then, shows that the school had a small front porch with a shed roof, but that was likely not original and was also removed by Mr. McMillen. I’m honored to be able to share these photographs, and am grateful to Dutch Henderson for the introduction, and to the Odum family for their generosity in allowing me to do so and for their continued stewardship of this important piece of Southern history. I’ll share more of their historic property in the next post.

The President’s Home, 1830s, Oxford

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This was built as a plain-style Greek Revival cottage by the first president of Emory College, Ignatius Few, and has been home to most of the school’s chief executives. The two projecting front wings were added during the presidency of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, and the Victorian details during the late 1800s. Longstreet’s daughter Virginia married Emory graduate Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar in the home. Lamar would go on to serve as a congressman, senator, Secretary of the Interior in the first Cleveland administration, and Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. He was also the namesake of Lamar County, in central Georgia.

Young L. G. Harris [namesake of Young Harris College] purchased the home in 1899 and presented it to the Emory trustees for use as a home for the school’s presidents, which it remains today.

Oxford Historic District, National Register of Historic Places

Bellevue, 1855, LaGrange

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Benjamin Harvey Hill (detail), circa 1870-1880. Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Bellevue is a grand Greek Revival mansion, originally the center of a 1200-acre plantation property, built by Benjamin Harvey Hill (1823-1882) for his wife Caroline Holt Hill (1825-1904). It’s surrounded today by one of LaGrange’s premier historic residential districts. It was donated to the LaGrange Woman’s Club by the Fuller E. Callaway Foundation in 1942 and they have been its guardians ever since.

Benjamin Hill, who was born at Hillsboro in Jasper County, has been called a political chameleon for his wavering views and various party alliances. He started his career as a Whig and then became a strong Fillmore-supporting Unionist. Ultimately, he was Southern partisan who voted in favor of secession and quickly voiced public support for Confederate President Jefferson Davis while serving in the Confederate senate. Davis was even a visitor to Bellevue. In response to Reconstruction and the governorship of Republican Rufus Bullock, Hill helped inaugurate the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia during a speech made on 23 July 1868 that supported violence against the governor and others in favor of the Reconstruction government. He was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives and to the U. S. Senate in 1877. He died in office in 1882. Ben Hill County is named for him.

National Register of Historic Places + National Historic Landmark

Governor Ellis & Mildred Arnall House, 1935, Newnan

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Ellis Gibbs Arnall (1907-1992) received his law degree from the University of Georgia in 1931 and returned to Newnan to practice law. He married Mildred Delaney Slemons (1908-1980) and built this house in 1935, in the same neighborhood where his parents once lived. He served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 1932-1938 and as attorney general from 1939-1943. He was elected governor in 1943 and served four years. His record still stands as one of the most progressive in the state’s modern history.

Platinum Point Historic District, National Register of Historic Places