Traveler’s Rest was built upon land granted to Major Jesse Walton in 1785 for his service in the Revolutionary War. Walton was killed by indigenous people near this site in 1789. The Walton family sold the land to Gen. James Rutherford Wyly (1782-1855), who built the original section of the house between 1816-1825. The property was purchased by Devereaux Jarrett (1785-1852) in 1838. Jarrett expanded the original structure to ten rooms. He opened it to the public as an inn, trading post, and post office, to meet the needs of a growing population made possible by the Unicoi Turnpike, an early public road in the area. Among its early guests was G. W. Featherstonehaugh, and English scientist who served as the first geologist for the U. S. government and a surveyor of the Louisiana Purchase.
This 1934 photograph by Branan Sanders for the Historic American Buildings Survey shows Traveler’s Rest looking much as it does today, albeit a bit overgrown. Courtesy Library of Congress.
It was known as Jarrett Manor during that family’s ownership. Notably, the last owner, Mary Jarrett White (1870-1957), was the first woman in Georgia to vote. The site is open, with limited hours, as a state historic site today.
The old Elbert County Jail. located adjacent to the courthouse, was built with funds from the Public Works Administration, a New Deal agency. Local architect Hunter J. “Chigger” Price (1896-1959) designed the building. Many such jails were built during the Great Depression, replacing older and less secure facilities. When this jail was replaced by an even newer facility, its future was uncertain. It is now home to the Jim-Ree African-American Museum.
Elberton Commercial Historic District, National Register of Historic Places
I first published this photograph on 15 June 2010 under the title “Wisenbaker’s Grocery & Market”, but I’m replacing it with a new post to update what I’ve learned, and to share a little about Dasher, thanks to an excellent brief history of the community by Faye Cook Wisenbaker. I believe this sign came from another building and was saved for its local importance.
Faye writes that all of the area south of Valdosta in present-day Lowndes County has connections to the Dasher and Wisenbaker families, who had their Georgia origins with the Ebenezer Salzburgers of Effingham County. James Wisenbaker and Christian Herman Dasher are the earliest known members of their families to have arrived in this frontier area of the Wiregrass Region. Dasher is believed to have arrived circa 1832. James Wisenbaker was his son-in-law and they had left the Lutheran faith in 1819 and began having services in their homes.
The area around Dasher was first settled circa 1842. Richard Herman Wisenbaker was also living in the area around this time, as he established “a congregation of New Testament Christianity” which would eventually be known as the Corinth Church of Christ, and today, Corinth Baptist Church. Faye notes that sometime before 1861, Wisenbaker “constructed a home using slave labor”.
The town was formally established as a station of the Georgia Southern & Florida Railway in 1889 at the residence of Virgil Franklin Dasher. By 1916, thanks to the timber and turpentine business, and the presence of the railroad, Dasher was a thriving place. The Dasher Bible School was established during that year and met in the Church of Christ until building a larger campus in 1928.
For the next three days I’ll be sharing Halloween-related images for a change of pace. I don’t think any will be too scary, except perhaps the one coming up on Halloween itself. This is just a harmless medical skeleton inside the historic doctor’s office at the Georgia Museum of Agriculture. Anatomical or medical skeletons were commonly found in doctor’s offices in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The museum website notes of the office: The Doctor’s Office was donated to the Museum by the Boston Marketing Association, and is believed to have been constructed in Boston, Georgia in the 1870s. The initial structure consisted of one room and was used as the office for Daniel Alexander Horn, a farmer and businessman of Boston. Doctor H. A. Vann began using the building as his office in 1898 and continued to do so through 1925, when he retired. A second room was added some time around this date. The exact year of this addition is currently unknown, but research indicates that it was between 1898 and 1902.
Skeletons are actually more accurate symbols for Halloween than Christmas trees are for Christmas, but I digress. Halloween, literally All Hallows’ Eve, is the day before All Saints’ Day, and historically a time for remembering the dead. In the early Christian church, it was tradition to hold vigils the night before major feast days.
The spookier aspects of our modern celebrations surrounding the holiday are thought to have pagan origins, mostly brought to white America by Celtic-adjacent immigrants. A long-held belief that the souls of the dead visit one night each year and therefore must be appeased and guarded against led to many of the stranger traditions. Wearing costumes, or disguises, and and lighting bonfires and lanterns, are but a couple of examples.
Unusual for Georgia jails in its “domestic” appearance, the old Effingham County Jail was built on the northwest corner of the courthouse square in 1935 to replace a simpler wood frame structure that was located at the corner of Pine Street and Early Street. An early project of the New Deal agency known as the Public Works Administration, the jail was designed in the Colonial Revival style by Savannah architect Walter P. Marshall, with the jail hardware done by Dalton’s Manly Jail Works. As was customary for the time, the structure housed the sheriff’s family on the first floor and inmates on the second floor.
At at time when Georgia had come under national scrutiny for the abysmal condition of its jails, the Effingham County Jail was seen as a positive development. The editor of the Springfield Herald wrote, in part: …the placing of the jail building was very cleverly done by the architect to give the best orientation, thus providing sunlight to all rooms and cell blocks…and that the County Commissioners are to be highly praised for their efforts in makingthis modern jail a reality, and it will do much toward the true prison ideal of making a prisoner a better citizen after his or her incarceration instead of a resentful or unruly person.
Hubert Carr (1895-1986) was sheriff when the jail opened and served in that capacity until 1960. His wife Hattie and daughters Louise, Dorothy, and Juanita all lived in the facility. The National Register of Historic Places nomination gives insight into how different sheriffs were in the past and gives insight into the matronly role of their wives, often overlooked: Sheriff Carr ordinarily allowed homeless people or domestic violence victims to spend a night in the holding cell, and Hattie, the sheriff’s wife, cooked breakfast for them the next morning. Mrs. Carr cooked all the meals for the prisoners in addition to her family’s meals. She provided two prisoner meals a day, which consisted of such foods as black-eyed peas, eggs, gravy, rutabagas, lima beans, cabbage, biscuits or cornbread and usually some kind of meat for each meal. She also provided baked goods, like sweet bread. Hattie washed the prisoner’s clothes in addition to her family’s clothes, took phone messages for the sheriff, and, occasionally, watched the prisoners when the sheriff was out on rounds. In her daughter Louise’s words, “She was the person who held everything together.”
The Carr sisters became familiar with the prisoners. Juanita, the youngest daughter, who was six at the time the family moved into the jailhouse, remembered playing baseball in the yard while prisoners acted as umpires by calling out plays from the windows on the second floor. Juanita also remembered becoming friends with one of the Black, female prisoners. All the sisters remembered one particular prisoner who sang hymns, like “The Old Rugged Cross.” He was kept at the jail for several months, and the girls became very attached to him. There were also family parties and significant occasions, like weddings, held at the jail. In Louise’s words, “We never thought about it being a jail. It was just home to us.”
This iconic Washington home was given to the State of Georgia for use as a house museum in 1957 and ownership was eventually returned to city. It has served as the Washington Historical Museum for many years and many consider it to be one of the best small-town museums in the state.
Built by Albert Gallatin Semmes circa 1835, it was originally a much simpler vernacular house, of the saltbox style. Semmes did not live in Washington for long, leaving for Florida in 1836. The house was sold to Mary Sneed in 1836. Georgia’s first Railroad Commissioner and an editor of the Augusta Chronicle, Samuel Jack Barnett, Jr., purchased it in 1857 and enlarged and gave it its present appearance. His heirs sold it to William Armstrong Slaton in 1913 and he owned it until his death in 1954.
This was the first brick church built in Tifton, and served the congregation of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, for generations. When they moved to a larger facility in 1952, it served numerous congregations over the following years. The Tift County Development Authority purchased it in 1985, to protect it from vandals and deterioration. In 1997, the Tifton Council for the Arts saw an opportunity and renovated the church into a gallery space and cultural museum. It is now known as the Syd Blackmarr Arts Center.
Tifton Commercial Historic District, National Register of Historic Places
Seabrook Village is a restored African-American community, depicting life among freedmen and their descendants from 1865-1930, and is one of the most unique living history museums in Georgia. [Unfortunately, hours are inconsistent and it’s not always accessible]. The pending loss of the little one-room schoolhouse pictured above is what drove the community to come together to preserve their historic resources. While it may seem abandoned and in a state of disrepair, it’s actually an authentic look into the challenges most Black Georgians faced on a daily basis from Reconstruction to the Jim Crow Era. The Seabrook community was established through land grants dictated in General William T. Sherman‘s Field Order No. 15 in 1865. This was the policy which became known as “Forty Acres and a Mule” and it afforded many former slaves the opportunity to settle land they had once worked as laborers.
The offices of the Seabrook Village Foundation are located at the adjacent Eddie Bowens Farm house.
Delegal-Williams House, Circa 1880
Meredith Belford writes of this house: [it] was moved from Trade Hill Road and fully restored at Seabrook Village in 1994. It was the home of Georgia Ann Delegal who was the child of freed slaves. Despite having limited education, her parents became very successful after their emancipation and amassed several hundred acres of land in the Seabrook and Trade Hill communities. They donated land for the original site of the Seabrook School and the present site of the Sunbury Missionary Baptist Church when it was moved from Sunbury to Seabrook in 1917. The house reflects their elevated status within the community.
Gibbons-Woodard House, Circa 1891
This house was built by Pompey and Josephine Gould and was originally located near Dorchester Station. It was donated by Lula Gibbons and moved and restored in 1994.
Privy
This is a typical “one-seater”, built with scrap materials that were on hand.
Sam Ripley’s Corn Crib, Circa 1930s
According to the Seabrook Village Foundation, this corn crib was restored using original methods and tools. It was originally located at the Sam Ripley Farm.
The Sanitary Barber Shop was established by Ben Lundy in the Cairoga Club Building in 1921. At some point, it became The Graco Barber Shop, which took its name from Grady County. It may be the finest surviving example of an historic barber shop in Georgia; it’s certainly the nicest one I’ve ever seen.
According to the Grady County History Museum: In 1936 the barber shop was purchased by Frank Massey and maintained by him until his death in 1965. One of his barbers, Winfred Robinson, bought the business and ran it until his retirement in 2010.
Long a popular Saturday stop for generations of Grady Countians it became much more than a just a place to get a haircut or a shave. Much like Floyd’s barber shop in Mayberry, it became the local information hub where people could catch up on the latest news and gossip. While they waited, pairs of combatants would play checkers while a group of kibitzers would gather around them and tell them what they were doing wrong.
Cairo Commercial Historic District, National Register of Historic Places
Seal of the City of Fitzgerald, created by David Jay
Fitzgerald was settled as an “Old Soldiers’ Colony” by a Union veteran and was known in its early days as a place of reconciliation, where veterans from both sides of the Civil War lived side by side in relative harmony. Fitzgerald’s Blue & Gray Museum, was established in the old Lee-Grant Hotel by Beth Davis in 1960 to document this fascinating history. It’s now located in the restored Atlanta, Birmingham & Atlantic Railway depot. The story is also told on the city seal, designed by David Jay. It depicts a Union and Confederate soldier shaking hands, flanked by the flags of their respective sides. The museum has evolved over the years to include other aspects of local history.
Encampment hat, United Confederate Veterans
The early settlers of Fitzgerald were very involved in commemorating the Civil War. Union settlers were members of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) and the Women’s Relief Corps (WRC) and Southern settlers were part of the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC).
Union Civil War drum, restored
Henry Bruner, the last Union veteran in the colony died in 1940, and William Joshua Bush, the last surviving Confederate veteran in Georgia, died at the age of 107 in 1952. Personal items belonging to these men, and other veterans, are part of the museum collection.
Roll Call of the States
Beth Davis was focused on the early history of the community, and initiated a “Roll Call of the States” to reflect the diverse background of the pioneers. It was her tradition to photograph people from other states when they visited. This was also a part of the pageant Davis wrote to celebrate the city’s history, “Our Friends, the Enemy”.
Hall of Honor, Blue & Gray Museum. This represents a tent used by pioneer settlers before permanent structures were completed.
Alongside Civil War relics, ephemera related to the town’s commercial and educational history are a big part of the collection. Fitzgerald’s large railroad presence is also highlighted.
It took many years, and is still incomplete, but the story of Fitzgerald’s black community is now included in the museum. This is an area that I hope to see expanded through community input.
Prominent black citizens, circa 1940s
I’ve served on the board of the Blue & Gray board for nearly ten years and am proud of my hometown’s history and my connection to it. I spent many afternoons with Beth Davis, often taking her home because she never learned to drive. Beth’s daughter Betty graduated from high school with my father and her daughter Julia graduated with my mother. David Jay was part of a regular tennis doubles group with my father for many years and played as well as most men half his age. Janie Law, stepdaughter of William Joshua Bush, graduated from Fitzgerald High School with my grandmother and was a family friend, as well.
View inside Blue & Gray Museum, showing a mantle from the Lee-Grant Hotel, and the favorite rocking chair of Georgia’s last Confederate veteran, William Joshua Bush. Flags of all 50 states are also visible.
The museum is open from 10-4 on weekdays (excluding holidays) and admission is $5 for adults and $2 for children. Call for more information: 229-423-5069.
