The old Muscogee County Jail stands in contrast to the newer facility, built in 2002.
The old Muscogee County Jail, built in by the Public Works Administration in 1939 to alleviate overcrowding and poor conditions at the Columbus Stockade (circa 1870) was in use until 2002. It was replaced by the modern facility in the background and there are already calls to replace the new jail.
The entrance to the old jail is typical of the Art Deco architecture of the New Deal.
There are no plans to restore the facility and it will likely be demolished in the future.
The historic Vienna School, later known as the Jenkins School (elementary, I believe), was lost to fire this afternoon. It was most recently home to Faith Christian School.
Photograph Courtesy Vienna Fire Department, via Addison Langley
Addison Langley just wrote: “I lived just down from this school for many years, was babysat in the kids class by my aunt and played so much on that play ground. It currently is on fire. I’m so sad to see this beautiful place burn and truly disappear.“
Photograph Courtesy Vienna Fire Department, via Addison Langley
The Peabody School served the African-American community of Eastman, first as a comprehensive school and later as an elementary school. An earlier wooden school (also named Peabody) was located on the current Peabody School site. The earlier school burned in 1925. It is not known whether that school served the white or African-American community.
From the National Register of Historic Places: “According to a December 10, 1937 article in the Eastman Times Journal. “It has been recognized that the Negroes of Eastman should have a more satisfactory school building…” Plans for the new school were drawn by E.C. Hosford and included classrooms, offices, and an auditorium. The construction was supervised by Lawrence Noles, a local Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) foreman. The federal government paid one-third of the materials cost and supplied all of the labor. The building was completed in June, 1938. The school housed all grades (1st through 11th , and later 12th) and served all of Dodge County. In contrast, during the same time period, there were 14 schools serving the white students of the county. Professor Burton served as the first principal, and some of the teachers were Mrs. V. Yopp, Mrs. Alberta Hamilton, Mrs. Letish Speed, and Mrs. Letic Edwards. One or more grades were taught in each classroom.”
“There is no documentation regarding the name Peabody and its association with the school. In newspaper articles referring to the school during its construction, the building is referred to as “Eastman Negro School.” There is some speculation that the school was named for George Peabody, the noted 19th century philanthropist, or possibly a well-known black educator. As stated above, the earlier wooden school building was also named Peabody School. In the early 1950s all grades were still housed at the Peabody campus with the 1st grade and 8th through 12th grades in the brick building, and 2nd through 7th grades in wooden barracks that had been moved from the Air Force base at Warner Robbins, Georgia. These also served as a lunchroom for the school. In 1953, Peabody School was one of seven black schools countywide. The others were Chauncey Junior High, Chester, Copeland, Lisbon, Mt. Olive, and Rhine Junior High.”
“According to Dodge County Board of Education minutes from January and February, 1954, there were plans to construct a large addition to Peabody School in order to accommodate the rising enrollment. By May of that same year, the board decided to construct a new African-American high school (extant, located southwest of the 1938 building, now serves as Dodge County Middle School) in order to reduce the overcrowding of Peabody and reduce the size of the addition.”
Peabody added a lunchroom to its campus and became an elementary school in 1957 and continued to serve the Black community until ceasing operation in 1967. The school buildings became the Dodge County Early Childhood Center in the late 1960s and closed in the late 1980s. They were acquired by United Concerned Citizens of Dodge County in 1994 for use as a community center.
Peabody School Mascot. The Peabody Tigers girls basketball team won at least two Class A State Championships .
Considering the endangered status of most early 20th century schools in Georgia, the survival of these structures is amazing. Demolition by neglect is the leading cause of the loss of historic schools, so the fact that the Peabody School was saved by a community coalition makes it all the more inspiring.
The Ocilla Community House was built between 1938-1939 as a project of the City of Ocilla and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal agency. A. S. Harris served as chairman of the building committee with A. T. Fuller, A. G. Shivers, and W. A. Tankersley, Jr. Claude McNeil was mayor of Ocilla at the time. Herman Hall, W. B. Hawes, Otto Griner, W. H. Simms, and T. A. Crouch served on the city council. The architect, Lauren Parrott (1901-1973), also designed another New Deal project, the Ocilla High School. Parrott built several public buildings and homes in the area.
The Community House has hosted numerous social gatherings, meetings, and school dances, as well as other events, in its 86 year history, and continues to serve its original purpose.
Note: This replaces a post which originally appeared on 28 January 2009.
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.
As I’ve discussed extensively over the years, the Irwinville Farms Project was one of numerous resettlement communities overseen during the Great Depression by the Farm Security Administration and the Resettlement Administration, as a means of helping rural communities much in need of outside assistance. Even though they are highly endangered, the structures related to this project are still well represented in the Irwinville area and are an invaluable resource that deserve documentation. The barns were all originally painted white but have faded in the nearly 90 years since they were built. They cost less than $200 to build and were considered very efficient. A testament to their quality is the fact that so many are still standing.
The Camilla post office, built by the Treasury Department in 1939, typifies the architecture of the New Deal, and contains a Works Progress Administration (WPA) mural. These classical buildings were “cookie cutter” in the sense that many have the same design, but they were architecturally and structurally sound, unlike the “cookie cutter” houses that seem to be everywhere today. Louis A. Simon was the supervising architect of the Camilla post office, though he was not involved in the actual construction. To my knowledge, it is still in use.
Camilla Commercial Historic District, National Register of Historic Places
Now known as the C. C. McCray City Auditorium, the Waycross Municipal Auditorium opened in 1937. It was a project of the Lions Club and the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal Agency during the Great Depression. After years of decline, it was restored in 2014 and renamed in honor of C. C. McCray (1925-2019), the first Black mayor of Waycross.
Over the years, it hosted numerous luminaries, including Ella Fitzgerald, Johnny Cash, Louis Armstrong, Otis Redding, James Brown, and Billy Eckstine. But Elvis Presley might be the most famous.
To my knowledge this is the only surviving location in Georgia, besides Atlanta’s Fox Theatre, where Elvis performed in the 1950s. On 2 December 1955, he played his first date in Georgia at the old Atlanta Sports Arena. That building was demolished in the mid-1980s. Elvis performed two shows here, at the Waycross City Auditorium, at 7PM and 9PM on 22 February 1956, sharing the bill with the Louvin Brothers, Justin Tubb, Benny Martin, and Mother Maybelle Carter. To my knowledge, no photographs of the concert have been located. Just a few weeks after his Waycross appearance, Elvis had his first number one hit, “Heartbreak Hotel”.
An interesting bit of trivia: Waycross resident Gram Parsons (Ingram Cecil Connor III), who was nine years old in 1956, attended the Elvis concert in Waycross, with twins Daphne and Diane Delano, and got the rising star’s autograph after the show. Parsons would go on to be one of the most legendary and enigmatic figures in the music industry, playing briefly with the Byrds and influencing everyone from the Rolling Stones to the Eagles. He is widely regarded as one of the architects of the country/Southern rock genre.
Downtown Waycross Historic District, National Register of Historic Places
As the date plate indicates, this gymnasium was built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression. Numerous structures of this type were constructed by the New Deal agency to not only provide jobs but to improve the cultural and recreational opportunities for communities all over the nation. In small towns like Buena Vista, such facilities often served a broader purpose, hosting musical acts, dances, dramatic endeavors, and charity events. Basketball was the central focus, however, and it was more popular than football in most communities until at least the 1960s.
The building is in a state of serious disrepair and has likely been unused for many years.
This building is part of a larger complex that served for many years as Marion Middle School. I believe it was originally part of the Buena Vista High School complex [I’m not sure if it was Buena Vista or Marion High School] and was likely built by the Works Progress Administration in the late 1930s or 1940s. If not a classroom building, it may have served as an office or other auxiliary purpose. I think it is still being used for adult education or a similar function.
