Contributing over $2 billion to our economy, peanuts are one of Georgia’s biggest businesses and their impact goes far beyond agriculture. According to the Georgia Peanut Commission: “Georgia produced 50% of the peanuts in the United States in 2024“.
Jesse Bookhardt writes: This house is the old Cicero Fowler home. I knew the family as a young person and Joe Fowler, a son, was one of my best friends. The house had a cement floor and I remember how cool it was compared to most of South Georgia houses that had floors of wood.
He adds: The windmill…stood to the left of the farm house. It was always a topic of discussion when I was young. I loved to see it pump water from the ground into the catch container.
My grandfather, Lloyd Brown, was the first successful peach farmer in Ben Hill County, and to our family’s knowledge, the only such farmer to take up this challenging crop. The weather in South Georgia is even less predictable than it is in Central Georgia’s Peach Belt. The whole operation only lasted about 15 years, finished circa 1970 by disease, but it remains a beloved memory to the family and to the many people in Ben Hill and Irwin Counties who bought peaches from Brown’s Peach Farm.
The peach farm was finished around the time I was born, but memories of the operation were very important to my family.
This is my grandfather at the farm in 1958, with some of his prized peaches, and plenty of Coca-Cola to go around.
I still have a few of those peach baskets.