This building has been hidden by vegetation on my previous visits to Omaha but was finally visible on my recent trip. It’s a simple vernacular warehouse-type structure. It may have been a store, a feed-and-seed, or maybe just a warehouse. The architecture is typical of agricultural facilities I’ve documented elsewhere, but I hope to learn more, because it’s right in the middle of town, by the well, and seems to be an important survivor of the town’s earlier days.
This building appears to have been a general store, or perhaps a restaurant, but I’m inclined to think it was a store. There may have been gas pumps out front, as well. When I can’t locate the proper resources, I just have to guess. Nonetheless, it’s one of the few “public” buildings remaining in the historic Upatoi [you-pa-toy] community. Surveys have dated it to 1933.
It’s believed that Upatoi was first settled circa 1790 as a satellite of nearby Cusseta Town, perhaps in some sort of support capacity. The area was dominated by Indigenous peoples at the time. It’s named for nearby Upatoi Creek, which rises in Talbot County and flows southwestward to form the border between Muscogee and Chattahoochee counties before joining the Chattahoochee River at Fort Moore. As to the origin of the name Upatoi, I won’t venture a guess except that it’s indigenous. A post office opened in the rural settlement in 1829 and remained open until 2017. [This building might have even served the purpose at one time.] Upatoi was annexed by the city of Columbus during the consolidation with Muscogee County in 1971.
At the extreme southwestern corner of Talbot County is the historic village of Box Springs. According to Ken Krakow: The community was named for a local spring that was boxed in and used as a watering stop for the railroad. Pipes were run from the “boxed-spring” to a water tower adjacent to the tracks. The name Boxed Spring was later changed to Box Springs, as it was easier to pronounce. A post office was established in 1853 though the area was likely settled earlier. The town was incorporated in 1913 and dissolved by 1931. Little of that era remains here today.
This old store, built in the early 1900s, sits in a thicket of privet and has always intrigued me; I may even have a family connection to Mr. Browning but need to research further. As the place succumbs to nature, I can only imagine it in its heyday, when the train stopped at the nearby tracks and people came through here enroute to and from Columbus.
This location near the Crawford-Upson County line was once a settlement known as Hickory Grove, undoubtedly one of several with that name in Georgia. Charlie Reeves purchased a house here in 1947 and transformed it into a combination store and residence, and part of it was located in Crawford, and part in Upson. Billy Powell, writing in Knoxville’s Georgia Post, called it the Plum-Nearly Store, for the fact that part of it was “plum nearly” in one county and the other part “plum nearly” in the other. When US-80 was widened, it was torn down and replaced by this structure, circa 1960. This one is located entirely in Upson County.
Though the store is no longer open, Mr. Reeves’s family still maintains it.
I made this photo in 2010 and had nearly forgotten about it. I’m re-editing all of my Emanuel County photos and realized I’d not published this photo because I wasn’t sure what I thought of the obvious “remodeling”. I’ve since learned that it was known as Hall’s Grocery, though I’m not sure if that was the first business located here. It faced the railroad and was a busy place in Summertown’s heyday. The cinderblock was added circa 1988 to protect the wooden structure underneath, as I understand it. The upper level was used for storage and the door on the gable was used to hoist items in and out as needed.
This general store faces the railroad tracks in what was the commercial center of the Kildare community of northern Effingham County. Following W. H. White’s death in 1930, his daughter operated the store.
It’s typical of myriad general stores in Georgia, and was built in the practical “shotgun” form, more often associated with houses. It’s quintessential rural Georgia to me, and I’d wager that every one of our 159 counties had at least one place like this in the past. It was easy to build, relatively inexpensive, and served its purpose without fuss or fanfare.
As the iconic photos taken by the WPA and FSA photographers during the Great Depression attest, most of these little stores were covered with tin signs in their heyday. When those signs became valuable, the ones not secured by their owners were stolen.
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This abandoned general store and filling station is located at the north end of Longstreet Road and is not far from a 1950s schoolhouse that has been tentatively identified as the Mount Olive School. I’m not sure if the name is correct; it may have been South Twiggs. It was definitely an elementary and middle school, though the term “middle school” wasn’t common with rural institutions at the time.
Stores like this hardly ever made their owners rich, but they were often well-loved local gathering places. Anything you didn’t hear about at church, you probably heard here. Most of these stores were built in very simple forms and I think that’s why a lot of them have been forgotten.
I usually identify them as general stores and not grocery stores. The reason I identify them as general stores is because they sold more than groceries. Batteries. Light bulbs. Any number of sundries. But remember, there wasn’t a nearby Walmart or a Dollar General at every crossroads fifty years ago.
The old store that once anchored James still stands, a sentinel of a different time. It was built in the 1890s, when the trains were still steaming through on a regular basis, and was Kingman’s Store back then. Robert H. Kingman (1876-1957) went on to become a prominent grocer in Macon. As Balkcom’s, it was open until the early mid-1980s. James Cicero Balkcom was an unusual character in small-town Georgia. He once owned a theatre in Gray and allowed African-Americans access. Apparently, not even their resignation to the balcony was acceptable, but Balkcom was unmoved. When he continued the practice, a group of young men drove by and shot into the side of his store, which was also the James post office, as a cowardly act of intimidation,. This was a federal offense, but Aubrey Newby says that no local effort to track down the perpetrators was made, or if so, it wasn’t successful. Just an interesting aside and a profile in courage of Mr. Balkcom, for sure. The post office remained open until 1969.
As to local color, Aubrey Newby writes: …There were two old spinster sisters Miss Alice and Miss Hattie James who lived in the Wood-Robinson house, Miss Alice drove a model T ford and you had better just get out of the way if you saw her coming. People moved away, the store closed and eventually the train stopped running. All that was left were scattered old houses, pieces of a train track and memories of what had once been a bustling town. My children still call it the railroad, we still talk about the store and I believe as long as we do, those people and those stories live. Davis and Dolly, Alice and Hattie, Libbie and T, most of them I barely knew if ever at all and yet I recall them as if they just left yesterday...
This community was first known as Frankville but was renamed Berner in 1896, for Col. Robert Lee Berner (1854-1922) of Forsyth. Berner served in the Spanish-American War, practiced law, was president of the Georgia senate, ran unsuccessfully for governor, and was instrumental in the construction of Macon’s Terminal Station.
It’s hard to imagine considering the isolation of this place today, but the post office remained in operation until 1957. Now, it appears to be a true ghost town.
At the shady intersection that is Cabaniss, this old shotgun store stands as a monument of the community’s past. The area was settled as Gullettsville by 1834, when a post office by that name opened. It closed in 1849. It was renamed for Judge Elbridge Gerry Cabaniss* thereafter and a post office for the newly named village was open between 1872-1904. There is a reference to a Castleberry’s Store in historical writings about Cabaniss, but I don’t know if this is it, or if it even survives.
*- I believe this to be Elbridge Gerry Cabaniss (1802-1872) but it could be his son, Elbridge Gerry Cabaniss [same name, not “Jr.”] (1845-1924).