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History of Greensboro, Georgia

In 1786 an act of the state legislature set aside the western lands of Washington County to create Greene County and its seat, Greenesborough (later Greenesboro, then Greensboro), which was incorporated in 1803. Taking its name from Nathanael Greene, a general in the Revolutionary War (1775-83), Greensboro served as the commercial center of one of Georgia's most important cotton-producing counties. The city's history illustrates the struggle, common to many small towns in the rural South, to emerge from the shadow of a cash-crop monoculture.

Located between the Ogeechee and Oconee rivers in Georgia's formerly rich cotton belt, Greensboro lies at the heart of Greene County, halfway between Atlanta and Augusta. The Creek Indians prized this region for its abundant game. The Georgia legislature created the county in hopes of attracting white settlers to the region and dislodging the Creeks. Although the state attempted to maintain a façade of legality in taking Indian lands, tensions ran high between white newcomers and Native Americans. In 1787 Indians attacked Greensboro, burning homes and killing residents. Despite these and other difficulties of frontier life, Greensboro and Greene County grew rapidly. By 1810 the county as a whole claimed 12,000 residents, half of whom were slaves. A decade later slaves composed a majority of the population.

Cotton is King

The phenomenal rise of the cotton economy facilitated the growth of Greensboro as the commercial center of Greene County. Fifty years after its founding, Greene became Georgia's largest cotton-producing county. In 1838, responding to the need to transport the region's ever-growing crop, the Georgia Railroad reached Greensboro, cementing the city's status as the county's commercial center. By 1854 the town had its own cotton mill, the Greenesboro Manufacturing Company. The merchant class that profited from this commerce became the town's elite.

Although cotton made a few men extremely wealthy and underwrote the proliferation of stores, banks, and civic buildings in Greensboro, it also created an underclass in the form of slaves and poor whites. Despite the social and economic system that kept a majority of the county's citizens enslaved and impoverished, there was little question of which side county leaders would support in the secession crisis leading to the Civil War (1861-65). All three of Greene County's representatives to the Georgia Secession Convention voted to secede, and Greensboro men organized the Greene Rifles to fight for the South. Of the men that Greene County sent to war, one-third would not return and another third would come back maimed or wounded. A portion of Union general William T. Sherman's troops briefly occupied Greensboro in November 1864 in a diversionary tactic meant to convince the Confederates that the Union troops were headed for Augusta, not Savannah, on their march to the sea.

Aftermath of War

The end of the Civil War unleashed pent-up social forces in Greensboro and Greene County. Many newly freed African Americans, looking for lost relatives or for a better life in the city, migrated to Greensboro and formed a community known as Canaan, which became a center of black activism in the following years. With the votes of the newly enfranchised African Americans, Greene County elected a slate of Republican candidates in 1868. But whites moved quickly to return blacks to their subordinate civic and socioeconomic positions. Through a series of beatings, home burnings, and murders, the Ku Klux Klan thwarted the promise of Reconstruction. Greensboro's blacks formed an equal-rights association and a militia, but despite their relative militancy, excellent leadership, and strong solidarity, they were unable to stem the tide. Greene County was officially "redeemed" in 1874.

Return to Cotton

Despite a short-lived attempt to turn toward increased food production, Greene County quickly returned to its dependence on cotton and suffered the attendant consequences. With the demise of the old plantation system, sharecropping and tenancy rose to take its place. The elite of Greensboro prospered, though. Many who formerly had only sold goods became moneylenders in the furnishing system, which arose after the demise of the old cotton-factory system. The proliferation of sharecropping contracts also led to a rise in the number of prosperous lawyers in town.

Despite a brief flirtation with Populism in the 1890s, the status quo held in Greensboro into the 1930s. The fortunes of the town and the surrounding area rose and fell with the vagaries of the international cotton market. As the boll weevil began to devastate much of Georgia's crop, Greene County turned more heavily toward cotton after developing a reputation for being "weevil proof." Prosperity before World War I (1917-18) led to a proliferation of automobiles and other luxury consumer goods in Greensboro and even allowed many tenants to become landowners. But in 1922 the weevil finally devastated Greene County's cotton production, ending the boom time in Greensboro and undermining land values. Both of the city's banks closed, the Georgia Railroad stopped making scheduled stops, and Greensboro languished until the innovations of the New Deal.

The New Deal Arrives

Greensboro benefited greatly from the try-anything attitude of the New Deal years. The offices of the Greene County Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration were located in the city. The roads to and from Greensboro became more heavily traveled by farmers looking to pick up checks from the Agricultural Adjustment Administration or to get information on the latest programs being offered by the federal government. The town's merchants undoubtedly weathered the Great Depression much better because of the money pumped into the local economy. As in the rest of the South, the federal largesse was not distributed equally. Despite Greene County's majority black population, relief mostly benefited its white residents, with those in Greensboro disproportionately assisted.

WWII and Beyond

Whatever temporary relief New Deal programs may have provided, Greensboro and Greene County could not truly prosper until there were enough industrial jobs to absorb the surplus agricultural population. Following the lead of the rest of the South in the early twentieth century, the county attempted to entice industry to the area through its Greene County Development Company. Greensboro recorded its first such success in 1899, when the Mary-Leila Cotton Mill opened. World War II (1941-45) proved a boon to the cotton mill, though it would achieve a certain amount of adverse notoriety when its workers went on strike for higher wages in 1941.

The number of farms and farm workers continued to decline in the aftermath of the war. Greensboro struggled to provide enough jobs for those who no longer wanted to farm or, having been pushed off the land, no longer could. In 1974 the town could claim some 918 manufacturing jobs (most of these in the garment industry) at a time when its population was 2,583 and that of the county as a whole stood at roughly 10,000. Today Greensboro and the surrounding area lag behind state and national averages in such areas as poverty and education. The industrial jobs offered in years past by large-scale operations, which could often provide an entrée for workers into the middle class, have largely evaporated, and the city still struggles to attract much-needed jobs to the area. Greensboro's largest employers provide service-sector jobs catering to the well-to-do who come to live or vacation on the shores of Lake Oconee.

According to the 2000 U.S. census, Greensboro's population is 3,238. Its lively and historic downtown area offers a variety of shops and services, as well as historic tours. Several museums, including the Greene County Historic Museum and the Calvin Barber Museum and African-American Resource Center, are also located in Greensboro.

History of Greene County

The Beginning

“The almighty had spoken. Time was. Life was.” So does Arthur Raper begin Tenants of the Almighty, his 1943 landmark history of Greene County, Georgia. The region was left well-endowed by these tumultuous eras of formation. It once overlooked a prehistoric Atlantic Ocean. The shoreline extended as far north as the “fall line,” a natural boundary separating the coastal plains of modern-Georgia from its piedmont. This shoreline crept up as far as the southern corner of Greene, and helps to explain the dramatic difference between the gray, sandy soil of southern county lands and the rich, red clay of its northern and western sections; fertile acreage that was not surprisingly dominated by large plantations during their day. Through the course of millions of years the ocean receded, and slowly, carefully, nature unfolded to resemble what we know it to be today. Small, swift streams swelled to form the Oconee, Apalachee and Ogeechee. Pine and hardwoods spread their canopies over the small arbor, flowering trees and forest floors thick with ivy, jasmine and muscadine. Granite outcrops rose up everywhere, easy ravines and valleys leading to the knolls, hills and rolling ridges akin to mountainous thresholds. Wildlife thrived. The waters were alive with bream and bass, their basins filled with catfish and mussels. Bear, deer, elk, fox, beaver and rabbits foraged alongside the quail, doves, turkey and geese. Great herds of buffalo thundered through the region, were drawn to the great salt licks naturalist and explorer William Bartram would find in 1773 on land east of what is today Union Point.

Then came the first man, settling amongst what Katherine Walters in Oconee River: Tales to Tell, called “a veritable Eden.” The original inhabitants were moundbuilders who built settlements on or near river plains. Many examples of Mississippian-period mounds still exist. In 1877, Dr. Charles C. Jones of the Smithsonian directed an expedition to the region and its mounds. They uncovered pottery, arrowheads, bones and burnt cinders. Studies in the 1980s directed by Mark Williams, a University of Georgia anthropologist, estimates that these original cultures existed, to varying degrees, between 1200 and 1500 A.D. The “Dyar” mound in Greene’s southwestern corner and the mounds north of Scull Shoals are glimpses into this archaic way of life. Other significant mounds were inundated with the damming of the Oconee in the 1970s and the creation of Lake Oconee.

The Creek .

The sixteenth century saw a new people come to the region. Whether they were descendents of the moundbuilding natives or unrelated is not entirely known. Whatever their lineage, their many tribes branched out along the waterways of Georgia. Many called the Oconee River region home. In the 1700s, traders titled them the “Creek” due to the unwavering proximity of their villages to water. These tribes would come together to form the great Creek Confederacy and would rule over this “Eden” for the better part of three centuries; an area including nearly all of modern-day Georgia, east Alabama, and north Florida. They were devoted and driven. They were “physically strong, had copper skin, black hair and a fondness for tattoos,” as per early resident descriptions. Their devotion to “Hesaketvmese,” or “the Master of Life,” was unwavering. They were largely sedentary, planting crops and farming. Seasonal crops yielded beans, peas, pumpkins, squash, sweet potatoes, fruits and their main staple; maize. The ripening of the corn corresponded with their most sacred and anticipated holiday; “Busk,” also called the “Green Corn Ceremony;” the Creek New Year. The Creek were skilled hunters, their hunting prowess finding its way into William Bartram’s journal. They were also feared warriors and often battled with the powerful Cherokee nation to the north. Greene County was the northeastern bounds of Creek land.

In 1540, DeSoto began his heralded exploration of what is now the southern United States. His expedition may have passed through Greene. Spanish coins are amongst the many artifacts that have been unearthed from Greene County land; though their appearance is more likely a result of trade than they are proof of DeSoto. Either way, the Spaniards did not stay. They went off in search of gold, leaving behind disease; a harbinger of things to come. Yet it would not be until the arrival of the English, and their rebellious American children, that the dominance of these natives would be challenged. In 1733, James Oglethorpe landed at the head of a few ships full of settlers and the “utopian” social experiment to be called Georgia; in reverence to the then ruling monarch of the British Empire. But philanthropic, ecclesiastical ideals quickly gave in before the greater importance of this outpost’s valuable raw material. Olgethorpe’s Savannah flourished, as did the frontier settlement of Augusta. By the 1750s, Georgia was a colony; its scattered, coastal villages part of a province. Traders began to penetrate the dark forests of this new land. At first they were met with skepticism amongst the Creek. But the Creek were traders themselves. And it soon became obvious that the white man had things they would need; the musket, for one. They did not fear the English, for the English seemed too busy fighting the Spaniards and the French, and had taken great care in cultivating a neutral, even friendly standing with the Confederacy. It wasn’t until the English began to squabble and fight amongst themselves that the Creek realized the dark prophecy behind the coming of the white man. It began with a treaty in 1773 which was forced on both the Creek and the Cherokee as reparations for, ironically, debts owed to colonists through the course of trade. It would not end until the natives had been driven from the lands.

Revolution and Settlement .

The American Revolution in Georgia did not unfold as the glorious deliverance of a tyrannized, freedom-seeking people. The colony, whether one was for the cause or not, was weak and underdeveloped. Its remote geographic location and remote place in the minds of leaders resulted in a lack of material, fighting men, and general effort during the duration of the Revolution. Both sides operated on thin support. E. Merton Coulter states in his work Georgia, that the state had “more to gain than to give in entering the revolution.” Patriotic sentiment was prevalent. But so was loyalty to the crown; the Tories. The war would prove to be as much a civil war as it would a revolution. Georgia did produce noted statesmen and soldiers. Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall and George Walton signed the Declaration of Independence. Elijah Clarke, John Twiggs, John Dooly and Jonas Fauche would distinguish themselves as fighting patriots. But the colony was still a frontier. English raiders could not be contained and campaigns against their bases in Florida were failures. Savannah was lost and the attack to take it back failed. Augusta fell into British hands. The war soon spilled into the frontier. Revolutionary forces scored a victory at Kettle Creek in 1779, but as Coulter goes on to relate, “Georgia . . . swung backward swiftly into a state of nature . . . the customs of civilized beings disappeared as a war of extermination began.” It was Tory against Revolutionary. Neighbor versus neighbor. Patriots stripped Tories of their property, and forced them to flee. Disenfranchised English found willing partners amongst the Creek in opening the war upon Patriot settlers. Alexander McGillivray proved the most notorious of these loyalists, and would vent his vengeance at the head of Creek raids against settlers for more than a decade. And it was amidst this chaos that the first settlers staked their claim in what would become Greene County.

As early as the 1770s, pioneers were carving out humble plots in what was then Washington County. Unlike the traders who moved on, though, this hearty, brash set was moving in. The Creek resented them. The bitter truce of 1773, which ceded millions of acres to the land-hungry Georgians, was fresh on the minds of the Creek living along the Oconee. Another such treaty in 1783 provoked even more animosity. While the end of the Revolution in 1782 signified the end of hostilities between the English and Americans, it signified a fiery beginning to hostilities with the Creek. William Bartram’s expedition of 1773 had delivered grand descriptions of the lands beyond the coast. He described in detail the bountiful cane and wildlife then thriving throughout the Oconee River valley. Following the Revolution, settlers began to pour into Georgia. And it was obvious to the infant Georgia legislature that this land of which Bartram talked was where they should be placed. A large, western portion of Washington County was surveyed in 1784. By act of legislature, on February 3rd, 1786, Greene County was formed from it; Georgia’s eleventh county. It was named for a patriot and a hero, Nathaniel Greene; Continental commander of the southern campaign that had led directly to the capitulation of Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781. But the simple creation of Greene County was overshadowed. Another more localized treaty had stirred the Creek into a fury. In 1786, the Treaty of Shoulderbone Creek, a swift tributary feeding the Oconee in lower Greene, was signed in which a number of Creek chiefs ceded another large portion of land to the Georgians. The Creek contested the treaty, claiming a few minor chiefs had represented the interests of the whole. In like representation, they took their case to the fledgling United States. Not looking for a war with the Creek, Congress voided the treaty. This enraged the frontier Greene Countians, and would prove one of the first steps in placing the loyalties of these southerners with their own rights over the rights of the nation. Most every settler ignored the rulings; the rulings proving virtually unenforceable at that. For a wave of migrants was descending upon Georgia.

This flood of settlers into Georgia was the result of the system of “head-right” grants. Any veteran of the Continental armies was provided 287 1/2 acres of land as compensation for his service; 50 additional acres for every family member, or slave if they owned them. The treasury of the U.S. was broke after fighting the long war. All the country had was land; massive tracts of land. In 1788, Georgia ratified the Constitution; was the fourth state admitted. It also had little to offer economically. But it had land. And on the impetus of the land grants, veterans poured into Greene County. Most were from Virginia and the Carolinas, bringing their hardscrabble ways and their religions with them. Thaddeus Brockett Rice, celebrated historian of Greene County, described the original settlers as possessing “little sophistication . . . sturdy, virile, and easy to anger”; advantageous traits for the hard life they would lead. Until the 1800s, Greene County would be the edge of civilization in Georgia.

Life on the Frontier .

The headwaters of the Ogeechee River appear near the eastern edge of Greene County. It was here that the first settlement in Greene arose. It was called Bethany, and was soon after joined by a small settlement along the Oconee River to the north and west named Scull Shoals. These were the outposts of America in the 1780s. Most settlers lived in rough-hewn log cabins. They set to the laborious clearing of land and grew corn, wheat, and marketable crops such as tobacco, indigo and cotton, which they used as barter for tools and material. They raised livestock which roamed free. Larger landholders marked their cattle with a registered brand. The pioneers hunted the plentiful valleys and forests, augmenting the hunt with the yield of the county’s waterways. And all the while, muskets were kept close at hand; resting against a tree at the edge of the field, or dragged laboriously, row by row as one worked. It was a state of alert anxiety. For the growl of a dog, even the most remote suspicion had settlers dropping their plows and axes and cocking the hammer of their flintlocks to fend off a potential raiding party. It is said that a particular Creek village located between Scull Shoals and current-day Greensboro on the west side of the Oconee was the source of most of the raids. More often than not the Creek were provoked by settlers “squatting” on their lands or stealing their livestock. Offenses were made by both groups. Be it Creek against settler or settler against Creek, both retaliated with violence. Until the 1790s, it was wilderness war.

In the late-summer of 1787, a Creek raiding-party fell upon Greenesborough. Laid out on land originally surveyed to house the state university, Greenesborough had quickly developed into a thriving settlement. Many settlers, Issac Stocks, David Gresham and Andrew Armour to name a few, built private stockades to protect their families. Greenesborough had a formidable one as well. But it was not enough on this day. The village was razed by the marauding Creek. Over 30 settlers were killed and many were wounded. Many more were taken captive. Reaction on the part of the settlers was immediate. Counter-raids were demanded, and carried out. Many Creek were pursued and killed. Governor George Mathews, appealing to the U.S. government for retaliatory action declared, “(we) can never have a secure and lasting peace with that perfidious Nation until they have felt the effects of war.” The local settlers organized their own force. Jonas Fauche, a distinguished patriot, was chosen to lead the local militia. No able-bodied man was exempt. Most were busy defending their own land, anyway. The raids would continue. A figure given totals 82 killed, 29 wounded, 146 captured and 89 houses burned amongst the settlers of the Oconee River frontier between 1787 and 1789. There is no record of the Creek’s casualties.

Yet despite this normalcy of frontier violence, Greene County was beginning to grow. Signs of civilization were penetrating this outlying collection of pioneers. Bethesda Baptist was founded in 1785. The Methodists and Presbyterians soon had places of worship. No frontier settlement existed for long without the binding salve of religion. Nor did it last without the necessity of education. The first school of record was the Union Academy in Greenesborough, it dating to 1786. The early 1790s saw this “sophistication” expand. Still, most schooling of the era was provided at home. Greene was made part of the upper congressional district. There are many contradictory reports of who represented Greene County at the state constitutional convention in 1795; David Gresham and William Fitzpatrick were known to be there. Other important men of the time were Moses Waddel, Oliver Porter, Redmond Thornton, and distinguished patriot Samuel Whatley. The first mail service began its run in 1792. Every other Friday, a resident could send a letter to Augusta to be mailed on from there. The cost was 10-15¢. Large-scale road projects improved land transportation. Large agricultural operations were being developed. Joel Early oversaw his farm “Fontenoy” at Scull Shoals, one of the first successful plantations in Greene County. Tax returns show as many as twelve men who owned 1,000 acres or more in 1788. By 1795, this number had doubled. This rate of growth would continue into the mid-1800s, until Greene could be counted amongst the wealthiest regions of the south’s “Black Belt.” It would also maintain the unrestrained expansion of slavery for another seventy years. As early as 1730 there had been talk of outlawing slavery in Georgia. That all changed when the potential of the then infant colony had been realized. W. J. Cash, among other noted historians, suggested that slavery was on the wane – until Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin. African-Americans would not realize true freedom in the south for another century and a half.

As important as any of the “civilizing” factors then appearing in Greene was the formation of law-enforcement and the courts. Coulter describes: “conditions were primitive, and justice was rude but swift.” True to this thought was the sentence imposed upon fraudulent tobacco dealers. Tobacco was considered legal tender; its misrepresentation made a capital offense. The guilty were “to be hanged by the neck until dead, and denied the benefit of clergy.” In 1790, George Walton, signer of the Declaration, presided over Greene County’s first superior court. It would be kept busy settling everything from minor infractions such as “profane swearing” to higher crimes against the county. In 1793, Hugh McCall and John Clark, son of Elijah [he removed the “e” from his last name] and future governor, were both indicted for starting a drunken riot in Greenesborough. They were not given special favor. Another incident involved the capital offense of forgery involving tobacco and two sons of prominent men. The sentence read, “You Stephen Heard and William Heard are both of you to be hung by the neck until you are dead. And the Lord have mercy on your souls.” The two, along with two other offenders, were ridden, on their coffins, out to the gallows and their last rights delivered – after which they were given pardons for their offenses. They were then released, stunned and scared. Fear was a calculated strategy on the frontier.

With its wealth of land, and even greater wealth of unclaimed territory to the west, Georgia was rife with speculation. The fraudulent Yazoo Land Deal was exposed as a cheap, land-grabbing scheme which involved the bribing of state legislators. Many prominent Greene Countians were named amongst the conspirators. Among them was Jonas Fauche who challenged his accuser to a duel and killed him. But it was another “land grab” which caused great problems for settlers of Greene. In 1794, Elijah Clarke, distinguished patriot and soldier, defied the national ban against claiming Creek land, crossed the Oconee with a large party of soldiers and set up his own nation state, calling it the Trans-Oconee Republic. This enraged officials from Georgia to Washington D.C. And worse, it enraged the already furious Creek. Raids had been a constant since the first days of settlement. But 1793-1794 were said to be the worst. Though the rogue republic was subdued and Clarke himself brought back and tried for treason, this had been the fuel which stoked the smoldering flame. The Creek fell upon homesteads all along the Oconee frontier. There were possibly hundreds of raids; documented and undocumented. Jonas Fauche himself was burnt out of his home, relocating to Greenesborough (the house still stands, is the site of McCommon’s Funeral Home). With the continuance of hostilities, the call for something to be done became unavoidable. A string of forts was ordered to be built along the Oconee. Fauche, still the captain of militia, was chosen to oversee the construction of the forts. Each one was built approximately eighteen miles apart. There were at least four in Greene County alone – Ft. Clark at Scull Shoals, Ft. Phillips at Carey’s Station or the confluence of the Apalachee and the Oconee, Ft. Fabius at Cracker’s Neck, and Ft. Alexander at the mouth of the Richland Creek. This line of defense was formidable, and provided for safer environs than most to that time had been used to. The population of the county continued to grow. Slowly, their overwhelming presence pushed the Creek west. By the turn-of-the-century, their threat was gone.

Development of the county began in earnest. The next half-century would be called its “golden days.” As the 1700s gave way to 1800, Greene County, the one-time frontier outpost of the new world, looked towards a very bright future.

The boats of the world stood at anchor in the harbors wanting cotton, and now that the cotton gins were operating, the virgin and fertile fields with the slave labor could supply their wants and a tide of wealth came into the South . . . The planters and their families lived in luxury . . . and their rolling lands as far as the eye could see were growing the fleecy cotton . . . The rail fences cut off lush green pastures for the blooded horses and fine cattle. The driveway curved up across a vast expanse of lawn, bordered by crepe myrtles or cedars on either side . . . Their homes were substantial and well built by slave labor . . . It was the slaves whose muscle turned a wilderness into a cultivated land.

Civilization comes to Greene .

By the arrival of 1800, the population of Greene County had exploded to over 10,000. In 1803, its largest town, Greenesborough, was incorporated. In 1807, the “Observator” became the first paper to circulate, and many were looking to expand local mail delivery. The Stagecoach Road from Augusta was driving its lanes through Greene into the interior of the state. The county was gaining prominence; as was Greenesborough, the county seat. A courthouse was built, as well as a stone, “bastille-like Gaol,” replacing the previous prison that was reportedly burned down in the attempt of a runaway slave to free a slave prisoner. Important men met to talk agriculture, to plot progress and discuss politics at Ye Eagle Tavern. Noted pioneer and resident Samuel Dale was commissioned by Thomas Jefferson to blaze a trail through Indian lands to the Spanish city of Walnut Hill, soon after to be known as Vicksburg, Mississippi. It was called the “Three-Chop Road” due to its blaze of three ax marks. In 1809, Zacariah Sims and George Paschal were awarded a loan by the state legislature to establish Georgia’s first paper mill; which they did within a year at Scull Shoals. In 1812, the state awarded a charter to the Oconee Navigation Co., whose sole purpose was to clear the Oconee from Athens to Milledgeville for the commercial, waterborne transport of goods. A few years later, Peter Early, son of Greene’s most prosperous pioneer settler, Joel Early, became governor of Georgia. Prosperity ruled the day. George Troup, governor during the late-1820s, would proclaim, “men and soil constitute the strength and wealth of nations, and the faster you plant the men, the faster you can draw from both.” Such was true in Greene during the early 1800s. The “head-right” grants that were being awarded to veterans of the Continental armies and the expansion of land lotteries kept settlers pouring in for decades. Yet as Arthur Raper pointed out, a general shift was beginning to take place. In Tenants of the Almighty he stated, “small businessmen began to feel the power of the plantation owner.” The plantation would be the center of Greene County life for the next sixty years.

In the early 1800s, though, Greene was still only a step removed from the frontier. Church-goers still carried muskets to service, armed guards being posted out front for fear of Indian attack. Yet by the turn-of-the-century, this practice was continued more out of habit than out of actual need. Thaddeus Brockett Rice relates, “those were the days when the land was fresh from the hand of God . . . and the rivers and creeks were full of shad and other fish.” The Oconee River was as rich a natural resource as the county could claim. Two fisheries operated along the Richland Creek section of the river, the Methodist, operated by, of course, Methodists, and the Yazoo, operated by the rival Presbyterian and Baptist segments. Members of the cooperatives would devote a set amount of time each year setting and repairing traps, harvesting and cleaning their catch for the respective memberships. Homegrown industries were establishing themselves throughout the county, hinting at greater operations of the like. Tobacco gave rise to the “Cracker’s Neck” community, also near Richland Creek where modern-day I-20 straddles Lake Oconee. The tale relates that farmers of the region rolling giant, cylindrical casks (called “hogsheads”) of tobacco to market in Augusta were dubbed “those boys from Cracker’s Neck” due to the snap of whips they would crack while urging on their beasts of burden. Everywhere the land was showing the potential of its yield. Gold was discovered in multiple locations, most notably in Daniel’s Spring near modern-day Union Point.

With the sprite steps that Greene took in nurturing its new, civilized demeanor, so continued the pursuit of taming its feral, frontier roots. Grand juries were busy condemning some of the lewd practices which typified Greene’s early days. Gambling, profanity, fiddling, and parading stud-horses to church was condemned. The churches made their objections known condemning such acts as chicken-fighting on Sunday, stealing roasting ears, and betting on horse races; the latter in direct reference to the Greenesborough Jockey Club which had indulged its members in the pursuit of gambling on horses since 1800. Georgia itself followed its recently civilized frontier by outlawing the barbaric act of “gouging,” fighting with sharpened rings, in 1810.

Everywhere within the county prosperity was giving rise to the development of this natural paradise. The Grimes, Doherty and Strain-Statham hotels were serving their guests. Impressive Greek-Revival homes were sprouting up in the townships and on massive, impressive lots; Oak Hill, Paradise Hill and Jefferson Hall to name a few. And the plantations were growing in a stature and wealth that was uninhibited.

The Rise of the Planter .

E. Merton Coulter in his history of Georgia, described the flourishing agricultural economy as “a philosophy of life and a civilization based on the soil.” It was an “economic organization and a business enterprise.” And these organizations, and the wealthy men who ran them, built empires in the south. As a result, they were holding more sway in matters both economic and political. Coulter states that “cotton’s influence in . . . political and agricultural thinking went far beyond its actual importance.” The plantation was a self-contained, self-sustaining operation. It turned out profits as well as yielding all the food and feed required for the residents, slaves, livestock and draught animals. Clothing was hand-stitched on its grounds and the forests provided fuel for cooking and warmth. The best lands were being bought up by the large landowners. The soil composition of Greene is divided into the rich, red-clay topography throughout its northern and western sections and the less-fertile, sandy gray lands throughout the southeast. Naturally, the planter-class migrated towards the rich red-clay where large farming operations would thrive. And thrive they did. Greene County would count over a dozen large plantations by 1860.

The rise of the planter brought on two social conditions of the time; the yeoman and lower-class, or non-slaveholding farmers, and the unchecked proliferation of slavery. With the planters’ reach spreading across the red-clay sections of the county, appropriately dubbed “Prosperity Ridge,” the yeoman and their families were forced to stake claims in the “poorer” gray-land of the county. Many packed up and moved out. Those who stayed were considered lower-class. Like the planter, the yeoman ran a self-sufficient farm and required little of the outside world. But here the similarities end. For cash crops were grown simply for bartering in the acquisition of tools and implements. The children of the yeoman were rarely educated. In the early 1800s, Georgia set up a “poor school endowment” to provide tuition to those white families without the resources to educate their children. A certain bloc of residents were considered candidates based upon tax records. Yet most proved either too proud to accept the “hand-out” or were generally disinterested in the concept of education altogether. Schooling meant losing a hand in the field. And practicality of the moment was more often a necessity than the long-term benefits of education. The typical yeoman may have owned a slave, but usually did not. And in the south at that time, slaveholding meant wealth, position and power. It meant the difference between an important man and just a man. Still, the region at the time resembled a large extended family. In many cases, especially on the community level, this was literally the case, a few extended families making up a majority of the population. This goes a long way towards explaining the general neighborly feeling that existed between the wealthy and the lower-class. In his epic volume, Mind of the South, W. J. Cash explained that “unaware of any primary conflict in interest, and seeing the planter not as an antagonist but as an old friend or kinsman, the common white naturally fell into the habit of honoring him . . . deferring to his knowledge and judgment, of consulting him on every occasion, and of looking up to him for leadership and opinion.” The south has always maintained a unique network of regional relations. This trait can be traced directly back to the earliest days of its settlement.

The second condition resulting from the planter’s rise was, of course, slavery. Slavery enabled this southern economic development, was the cornerstone in its foundation. Celebrated southern historian C. Vann Woodward defined it as one of the “burdens of southern history,” and rightly so. For the standards of socio-economic life today can only hint at the attitudes of life during the early years of this country which proliferated slavery and its inherent prejudicial demeanor as a matter of course. Slavery was widespread in Greene County, and its sister “Black Belt” counties where land was fertile, abundant and waiting to make men wealthy. Slavery seemed on the wane during the post-Revolution years, a notion voiced by the notable southern historians Coulter and Cash, amongst others; Greene’s own T. B. Rice for one. But Eli Whitney’s cotton gin changed all that, irrevocably. The cotton gin made cotton the single most efficient cash-crop, and its farming spread through Greene County and the south like wildfire. Slavery, as a result, became entangled in the southern landscape; became an indispensable institution. The slave population increased to over 7,000 in Greene by 1840, almost double the amount of white residents. The day-to-day experience of slaves has found its way but sparingly into popular history, much of what has been written being tainted by prejudice and misrepresentation. Generally, slaves were treated well; well in that they were fed and clothed. They were property, an economic expense, and this being the case were taken care of as such. Plantation owners varied man to man in their benevolence. Some allowed their slaves to accompany them to church. In 1818, balconies were built into the new brick Bethesda Baptist Church in order to accommodate slaves. Yet whether in an altruistic environment or not, the identity of the slave was in every instance subservient to the will of the master. When there was trouble, the penalty was often brutal and inhumane. Slaves were bought and sold irrespective of family lines. Slave life was institutionalized humiliation. Many slaves had been born into this life, and knew no other. Many survived through fatalistic resolve alone. In Tenants, Arthur Raper describes a strangely romantic scene in which children of the favored black house servants run and play together with the plantation owner’s white children. This was common. For even amongst the slave population there was class distinction. But Raper goes on to describe the obvious contempt, regardless of station, for this life of bondage. He talks of a scene in which the children of field hands were called to their lunch which was eaten out of a trough. Demeaning enough, while they ate one of the house servant’s children began to walk through the trough as if to show that though he was a slave he was better than slaves in the field. The boy was pulled from the trough and beaten to a pulp by the field hands. But this story pales when compared to the understandable contempt which was often manifested to a much higher, more violent degree amongst adult slaves. Those slaves who were new or unbending before the rigid dehumanization of slavery were often belligerent. They were beaten mercilessly, often before the rest of the plantation’s slaves. Many committed suicide. Raper relates:

"Some found the slave’s lot intolerable and killed themselves so their spirits at least might return to their native country. It is reported that one slaveholder overcame this practice ‘by cutting off the head of the suicide,’ and telling the other slaves that even if the dead man did return to his country he would be without a head."

Negro slaves’ contempt for their situation showed itself in more militant ways. Slave insurrection was a constant fear amongst southern whites. And it was dealt with harshly, resulting, without fail, in capital punishment. In Donald Grant’s telling volume, The Way it was in the South, he talks of a slave from Greene known as Captain James who reportedly told of an insurrection slated to begin at midnight on April 22, 1810. The plot apparently involved killing local whites, seizing arms, and relying on the insurrection to spread into a formidable force. There is no record of any insurrections in Greene, but Grant stipulates that this may have been a model for Nat Turner’s slave revolt in Virginia in August, 1831. Census records listed 20 “free persons of color” living in Greene as of 1820. But “free” meant anything but. Freedom for blacks in the south would not realize reality until civil war created a military strategy of it. “Legalized” freedom for African-Americans would not be realized until Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

Golden Years .

Despite the dark underbelly of southern economics, optimism ruled the day. The War of 1812 was met with patriotic support in Georgia. The state militia included many men from Greene. They fought with Andrew Jackson and helped win the war. And with victory, the infant United States felt for the first time what Coulter called, “the development of a rampant nationalism.”

Politics became a part of the national lexicon. It was especially popular in the south. Coulter describes, “it was necessary to amuse Georgians, not convince them if their votes were to be secured . . . (such a) method of securing votes was the barbecue, where roasted pigs, calves, and sheep were much more convincing than any amount of dry argument.” T. B. Rice mused detailed descriptions of “hog-killings and corn-shuckings,” which served no political purpose but showed Greene’s high regard for such gatherings. Georgia had been at odds with Washington for decades over land cessions with the Creek, when the hated “Protectionist” tariff act was passed in the late 1820s. The controversial act was blasted for favoring the northern manufacturing industry over the interests of the southern economic scheme. The call of “states rights” was heard in the south; and with it “nullification” of the act. This basic difference of opinion had shown itself within vehement arguments, and was to be one of the first steps in leading the south down the road towards secession.

Despite political turmoil, and a bank panic in 1819, times were good for non-slaves in Greene County. In June of 1820, Greene received one of its most famous guests. Andrew Jackson made an anonymous business trip here, visiting a relative who just happened to reside in Greene. He was quickly found out, and the county rallied together a grand dinner for the war hero, soon-to-be president. The county had also rallied to the cause of education, in Arthur Raper’s words, a “progress of the mind.” Aside from Greenesborough Academy, who’s 1821 curriculum included Milton’s “Paradise Lost” amongst the standard reading, writing and Latin, Greene could claim Brockman United, Lafayette Hall, Thornton Academy, and White Plains Institute by the 1830s. But the most important school for which Greene could boast came about in 1831. A convention of prominent Baptists in Savannah hatched the institution that would become Mercer University. Adeil Sherwood, with the financial help of Thomas Stocks, W. Flourney, and Josiah Penfield, had secured the school’s charter by 1837. Classes began at Mercer two years later, the university named for Sherwood’s long-time friend and supporter, Jesse Mercer. The village that grew up around the school was named in honor of Josiah Penfield. Greene entertained many teachers who would go on to great fame: Louisa Alcott, Dr. Francis Goulding (author of “Young Marooners” a wildly successful book akin to Robinson Crusoe), Dr. Joseph Wilson, father of Woodrow Wilson, our 28th president, and a rumored, ironic figure, William Seward – who would become an outspoken Republican later serving in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. Country doctors were popular and were the first form of healthcare in the county. Though their trade was rudimentary, riding horseback to deliver babies, set broken bones, roll pills and administer herbal remedies, they were highly sought; some highly respected. Dr. Lindsay Durham of Scull Shoals became the most famous of the county’s early doctors, his reputation reaching far past Greene County.

It was in its economic development where Greene County, and the south, reaped her greatest benefits. In 1833, Georgia celebrated its one-hundredth birthday, and everywhere prosperity ruled. Penfield was fast becoming a center for Baptist publications, and the Athens Southern Banner enjoyed wide circulation in Greene County. The Athens Banner covered the general vicinity and outlying areas, a March 12th, 1839, article reporting this news from Greene:

"6 horses attached to an Athens to Augusta stagecoach ran away in Greenesborough and turned over the coach, injuring 3 passengers; one of them feared lamed for life.

In answer to the growing problem of depleted soil and erosion brought about by unwise farming practices, an agricultural club was created. Thomas Stocks, one of the county’s most influential leaders in business and politics, his residence “Oak Hill” among the county’s finest, became the club’s first president. The club would eventually develop into the Georgia Dept. of Agriculture. Greene nurtured many influential men; James Park, Robert and W.H. McWhorter, and Thomas Janes, who were planters, Thomas Cobb and William Dawson, who were state representatives, and noted bishop George F. Pierce, among others. But in 1827, a man named Thomas Poullain took over the operations at Scull Shoals, and quickly became the wealthiest man in the county; as well as its largest slaveholder. Scull Shoals had endured a checkered past. Sims and Paschal had been forced to sell in 1815 to Thomas Ligon. Ligon soon encountered his own difficulties due largely to the mercurial Oconee River; the power source and lifeblood of manufacturing at Scull Shoals. Poullain streamlined the operations and concentrated on milling cotton. Despite a devastating fire in 1845, the mill was soon devouring 4,000 bales of cotton a year and operating 2,000 spindles; a considerable number for the day. Cotton Mills were springing up throughout the south. Greene also claimed mills in Greenesborough and John Curtwright’s at Long Shoals. Industry in general was thriving. The census of 1840 listed 47 industries in the county. There was the tinsmith John Zimmerman, and the blacksmiths Miller & McKinley. There were wagon shops and many cotton gins. Yet the most unique business belonged to Josiah Davis & Orville Barber. They were clockmakers originally from Bristol, Connecticut, who found Greenesborough an advantageous setting. They relied heavily on slave labor in the creation of their intricate clocks, and had soon gained a reputation. Aside from the actual clocks, the detail of their casings included beautiful carved eagles and cornucopias; their trademark detail, meticulous, reverse-glass paintings.

Despite the county’s impressive resume, it all was second to the coming of the railroad. The Georgia Railroad was, at the time, only the third operation of its kind in the entire country. Its construction began in Augusta in 1833. Within three years, it had reached Lemuel Greene’s impressive “Jefferson Hall,” in the eastern portion of Greene. The story goes that a stretch of the Stage Road within the county, prone to bottomless mud and impassable after a rain, prompted the railroad’s coming to Greene. By 1836, the first leg was complete. Work began on a branch line to Athens from this terminus, two-miles past Jefferson Hall. So was born the town of Union Point. But the railroad was not met with immediate approval by all residents, Gwynn Allison having chased railroad surveyors off his property at gunpoint. The train was loud and obnoxious, the first engine to run dubbed “the Firefly” due to the sparks it would shoot. There was, in fact, a noise-ordinance for many years which prohibited the engine’s running at night. But as Coulter explains in Georgia, “the coming of railroads was of extreme importance; on them awaited the rise and fall of cities, and the growth and decline of whole sections.” Only the interstate system of a century later would have more impact on the history of transportation in the United States. The Georgia Railroad’s construction was soon making its way west through Greenesborough, and was heading for the little town of Marthasville; later to be renamed, Atlanta.

Dark Clouds on the Horizon .

In 1836, Greene County militia were enlisted to fight alongside Federal forces in the Florida Seminole Wars. But as the years passed, political, economical, and social philosophies fired obvious cultural strains that would eventually tumble recklessly into our nation’s Civil War. Daniel Grant, one of Greene’s most successful entrepreneurs, freed his slaves in 1840 and moved to Atlanta where he would become a railroad giant; Grant Park in south Atlanta, being named for him. Joel Early, son of the county’s first large planter, also freed his slaves, and even paid their way back to Africa if they wanted it. Elsewhere, though, slaveowners were digging in. Arthur Raper explained, “slaveowners who among themselves had earlier expressed misgivings about the system were now becoming united in their unqualified defense of it.” The feared abolitionist movement in the north, a collection of freed blacks, priests, and political leaders, was taking aim on slavery and that section of the country which proliferated it. In 1835, a grand jury in Greene answered with the proclamation “the interference of abolitionists” was a “grievance to the whole South.” Rhetoric became more provoking and damning over time. And lines were drawn.

In 1848, Greene County built its third and most impressive court house; which still stands. The 1850s saw the creation of two female academies, one in Penfield, the other in Greenesboro (it was about this time the “rough” in “Greenesborough” was shortened, the reason unknown). A bank panic in 1857 could not curb the optimism shown in an article written for the Greenesboro Gazette: “we are glad to note that our little city is beginning to look up a little – that the spirit of improvement has taken hold.” And an ad that year proclaimed “good bye” to tallow candles; “as artificial light is indispensable . . . we . . . recommend use (of) Kerosene Oil.” Indeed, industrial progress was still in motion. Yet everything else, it seemed, was changing. In Jonathan Bryant’s telling, provocative history, How Curious a Land, he states:
"Even the poor had opportunities in Greene County not usually found in rural areas, for they could find work with the railroad or in one of the county’s cotton mills. For one-third of its population Greene County offered opportunity and prosperity . . . The other two-thirds . . . however, lived in bondage. While witnesses to and an integral cause of the county’s prosperity, these slaves inhabited another world."
Socially, the country was deteriorating along cultural lines. E. Merton Coulter states:
". . . they (north and south) lost their reason as their passions carried them forward, and they sought no longer to understand each other . . . secession came as a recognition that the country was already divided – in religion, in politics, and in every kindly regard and feeling for friendship."
As telling a result of this truth was the splintering of the churches, north and south. Southern Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians all formed their own organizations separate of their northern brethren. In Greene, slaves were no longer allowed to worship with whites.

In 1859, the mounting unrest exploded with John Brown’s raid of the Federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Hoping for a general uprising amongst the slaves throughout the south, which never came to be (the raid suppressed by none other than U.S. Colonel Robert E. Lee), Brown came to embody northern intent. C. Vann Woodward explained in John Brown’s Private War, that Brown became a “symbol of the moral order and the social purpose of the Northern cause.” Coulter stated in Georgia that it was “an impossibility to save (the) ante-bellum south without slavery . . . (for) without it there would be a race problem.” Yet in the south, slavery was such an ingrained part of its character that the argument over its existence was eclipsed by the call of the southern homeland echoing simple, cultural survival. Woodward also explained the south’s defiant response as, “let the ‘higher-law’ of abolitionism be met with the ‘higher-law’ of self-preservation.” Woodward summarized the whole situation by writing, “paranoia continued to induce counter-paranoia, each antagonist infecting the other reciprocally, until the vicious spiral ended in war.” And this war would come down hard upon the south, and Greene County. It would change everyone and everything forever.

Everything wears a melancholy and gloomy aspect as the sad result of Lincoln's Election. May the Good Lord protect & guide us in this time of peril to our country.

The Coming of War .

In 1855, a traveling merchant from New England known to history as “Webster” came to Greene County. Word got around of him spreading his abolitionist views. He was subdued, tarred and feathered, and driven from Greene by a mob. The mood of the event was celebratory. A few years later, Thomas Miller, a merchant from Cleveland, was picked up, delivered to a depot and forced to leave, despite his vehement denial of any abolitionist intent. The tone of this confrontation was said to be much more serious. The editor of the local Weekly Gazette, soon to be named The Planter’s Weekly, demanded that the designs of outsiders be known and monitored. In 1859, a runaway slave of William Luckey’s was captured. While attempting to punish him, the slave grabbed a knife and stabbed Luckey to death. But this was rare. For as Jonathan Bryant stated in How Curious A Land, “Greene County’s slaveholders did not fear their slaves as much as they feared outsiders’ influence on their slaves.” Such could be said of most of the cotton belt. Black slaves were as important as legal tenure, commanding a price as high as $1400. Insurrection at the hands of northern agitators was as egregious an offense as armed robbery, abolitionists nothing more than common criminals to the antebellum mindset.

Yet the true threat to the wealth of the South, be it their land or their slaves, was less the small bands of abolitionists and more so the encroachments of northern business interests. Politicians had taken up the economic causes of their respective sections, clashing repeatedly and viciously with opponents. Dialogue fell away in the 1850s, was replaced with presumption, stereotypes, reckless manipulation, fervor, panic, and fear. In John Brown’s Private War, C. Vann Woodward described the conditions as, “a pathological condition of mind in which delusions of persecution and impending disaster flourished.” Economic rifts infected politics, in turn infecting cultural points of view north and south. Northern industrialists had gained controlling interests of the emerging market-based economy upon which southern exports relied. As a result they applied political pressure and held sway over many areas of federal decision-making directly impacting the future of the southern plantation-based economy. Add in the growing movements aiming dissent at the injustices of slavery, and therein lay the perceived threats. The South was moving from a self-sufficient civilization that produced for the world market and more towards a culture dependent on that market long prior to the Civil War. Still, southern leaders were not about to let economic and social forces outside their bounds determine how that future should unfold. Southern leaders saw their culture, as they knew it, being threatened to the very core. The notions and practice of industrialism and the howling of abolitionism sought to tear apart the very fabric of southern culture. Opinions escalated into battlecries. As Confederate patriot and Greene County neighbor, Robert Toombs, proclaimed, “we must expand or perish.”

Abraham Lincoln’s election in November of 1860 brought with it the Republican platform of halting the expansion of slavery. In Greene County, the majority of votes cast in the election had been for the Constitutional Union, or “Whig,” party ticket of John Bell & Edward Everett. Their platform had pushed dialogue with the end hope of sectional reconciliation. As impractical as this platform was, it was still a hope. Yet it was a footnote. Lincoln’s victory equaled a declaration of war to many southern leaders. Lincoln would hold the Union together at any cost. In Greene, a resolution denounced the election. Calls were made to raise the militia. Economic extinction meant cultural extinction and Lincoln was the very symbol of this fear. Though Lincoln’s fledgling party enjoyed no majority in Congress, thereby limiting legislative power, even the mention of bottling up the slaveholding states would not stand. The South would move towards secession at various speeds, hinting the inclination towards statehood over nationalism that would eventually do in the Confederacy as a governing body. Yet in early 1861, as Coulter wrote in Georgia, “excitement ruled the day.” Crowds listened to fiery orations and cheered southern independence. T. B. Rice quoted a C. Yarborough who’d said, “the rich old blood of the Revolution was leaping in the veins of descendents of Revolutionary sires.” Coulter describes state leaders as urging concerted action to “end forever `Northern aggressions and insults` and on this wave of enthusiasm Georgia was swept out of the Union.” Nathaniel M. Crawford, Richard J. Willis, and Thomas Poullain were elected to represent Greene County at the capital in Milledgeville. On January 19, 1861, the order of secession was passed. Georgia had left the Union. A general feeling of celebration swept the whites of Greene County. And the country tumbled headlong towards a horrific war.

Shelton Sanford, Mercer’s quiet professor of arithmetic, possibly foresaw the dark days that war would bring. In his diary entry for January 21, 1861, he wrote:
"At night (I) heard the firing of Cannon in Greenesboro, rejoicing as I suppose over the secession of Georgia. Whilst as a Georgian I shall submit to the action of the state, still I cannot rejoice in the dissolution of the Union."

Years of War .

Both Raper and Bryant document a letter printed in the June 5th, 1861, Planter’s Weekly. It was a call to arms to men of fighting age and residents of the homefront. It said, “This is emphatically a people’s war, and the people must sustain it or perish.” The literal isolation of populations at the time allowed emphatic alarm to spread without check. In 1861, in Greene, this was answered with resolve. Support of the Confederacy was total. On April 12, Ft. Sumter was fired on. It was surrendered a day later, Shelton Sanford noting, “General joy everywhere.” Lincoln soon called for 75,000 Union volunteers to put down the rebellion. The infant Confederate government in Richmond did likewise. Three companies, approximately one hundred men each, were raised in Greene County: The Dawson Greys from Penfield, The Greene Rifles from Greenesboro, and the Stephens Light Guards. Bonds were issued by the Inferior Court to arm and cloth the men. Over the next two months they were drilled into form, presented flags sewn by the local women, given lavish celebratory galas full of pomp and oratory, and paraded to depots where they shipped out to join the army gathering in Virginia. They would see deadly action immediately.

Scott Glass compiled an exhaustive resource on Greene’s Confederate soldiers. He records 900 men as serving. They were engaged in all major theatres of action. His research also indicates that Greene’s soldiers suffered heavy casualties early. At First Manassas, the first major engagement of the war, the Stephens Light Guards took part in the stand that would grant “Stonewall” Jackson his nickname. The company suffered, as part of the 8th Georgia to which they were attached, the highest C.S. casualty rate of the day. George Butler, just one of the many rank and file who were quickly delivered from a flag-waving naivety upon the carnage of military conflict, described the sickening post battle scene: “i never want to see such a sight again, the ground was covered with our ded and the grones of the dying.” The realities of war arrived to those back home almost as quickly. Casualty lists were posted at the county courthouse. Raper relays instances of soldiers’ letters from the front arriving home after their families had found out that they’d been killed in action. In the fall of 1861, a pro-secessionist play was held in White Plains. Fourteen year-old Laura Alfriend symbolized, allegorically, the Confederacy during the play. She walked onto stage holding the “Stars & Bars,” and took her place. As she did, a candle-lit footlight on stage caught her robe on fire. The young girl was burned to death before a horrified crowd. The war’s staggering death toll would soon swamp this local tragedy.

1862 was a reality check for the Confederacy, and the people and soldiers of Greene. In the field, Greene’s own fought and died in the Seven Days, the Battle of Second Manassas, the cataclysmic clash at Antietam, and Fredericksburg late in the year. With few exceptions 1862 was successful for the Confederacy, militarily. But at home the situation foretold of expanding disillusion. C.S. legislators realized early that they were outmatched in men and material. Again, the call went out for volunteers. In Greene two more companies were raised, the “Greene” and “Stocks Volunteers.” The “Greene Volunteers,” with the 44th Georgia, were tested immediately at the Battle of Malvern Hill, part of the Seven Days. They sustained heavy casualties. Yet volunteerism was not enough. In April, Richmond was forced to initiate the first draft in American history. It brought vehement denunciations from Southern governors. Georgia’s own Joseph Brown, a tireless defender of the state described by Coulter as watching over Georgia with “a sharpness often more zealous than wise,” fired off vicious attacks against the “dictator Jeff Davis.” Still, the draft went forward. Two more companies of men were formed in Greene. The war would require unequalled sacrifice from the South.

In the beginning, the war was a remote entity in Greene. Yet as much as its inhabitants tried to maintain normalcy things were changing, economically, socially, culturally, beyond the simple expectations of 1861. Bryant explains that, “slavery shaped and literally colored the economic, social, and cultural structures that defined southern society.” And though a small percentage of whites owned slaves, this view holds. For slavery represented the lowest rung in the succinct class structure that defined antebellum days. Slavery would continue in Greene long after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued; continuing until occupation forces arrived months after Lee’s surrender. But even amongst the staid order of the plantation, things had changed. Most of the white men were off fighting. As a result, many slaves took on more important roles. Women often oversaw plantation operations, but it was the slaves who worked its fields. This war went forward under the relatively simple notions of nationalism, honor, patriotism and rights. But it would prove to be the killing grounds of such cultural innocence. For this war would transform everyone and everything, would become the proving grounds of our cultural expectations of a democracy.

The War Comes to Greene .

Raper documents a Grand Jury resolution passed early in 1862, stating, “members of this body individually will plant no cotton except enough for domestic use during the year of 1862.” Since most of the men on the grand juries of the time were of the wealthy strata who ran Greene, this directive, to pursue only those enterprises that would support the cause, was law. This was made apparent when the owners of the largest manufacturing interests in the county, at Long and Scull Shoals, were found guilty of price-gouging. Matters often fell to the mob. Isaac Harman, a Jewish merchant in Penfield, was accused of price-fixing by Mercer students, and beaten. Harman’s guilt is questionable. Yet speculation and profiteering was having a disastrous effect on Confederate legal tender. As early as 1862, the C.S. dollar was wracked by a spiraling inflation. Prices rose rapidly. One redeeming factor was that the South, especially Greene, once again became a land of self-subsistence; important since Southern money was soon worthless. Most pursued the day-to-day routine with honest resolve. Thomas Janes and David Barrow were wealthy planters who supported the war with foodstuffs, providing, in the antebellum tradition of `noblesse oblige,` charity to needy neighbors. But this charity only went so far. Resources became scarce. Raper states, “supplies from farms and towns were drained off with the men.” Greene produced little industry for the war effort; this indicative of the agrarian South in general. Cotton bagging was produced at Scull Shoals and the Leech & Rigdon Arms manufacturers produced revolvers, but there was little else. The contribution of women were many. They took over arduous tasks on the small farms and “virtually clothed the Confederate armies,” as Coulter states in his monumental history, The Confederate States of America. Greene’s Soldier’s Relief Society provided hand-sewn clothing. Rice stated, “the list of women who provided by making stockings and clothes … runs likes a muster roll.” In the fall of 1862, the Wayside Home opened in Union Point. A crossroads relief station on the Georgia Railroad line, it provided food and lodging and saw to the terrible work of nursing the wounded, convalescing, and dying soldiers that passed through. A soldier under their care called the women of the Wayside Home, “visions of angels.”

Yet despite these efforts, the war overwhelmed the South. Unrecoverable losses were occurring in the field. The Confederacy could not replace the men falling in battle and its countryside was stripped bare by marching armies and its own government impressment agents. In July of 1864, Sherman successfully invested Atlanta. Only a hundred miles east on the Georgia RR line, Greene was soon inundated by the casualties of Atlanta. Most every building in downtown Greenesboro found use as a hospital. But for the supreme optimist, or the unrealistic, the darkness of war was spreading long shadows. Coulter states in Georgia, “the lot of the mass of the people during the war was one of great privation and suffering.” Even the great wealth of the plantations was not enough. The majority of small farms endured near starvation. The war taxed the land as hard its people. But it was the people who suffered. A soldier came home on furlough to be with family, and his daughter Secessia, named in honor of the cause. As Raper relates in Preface to Peasantry, “in preparing to return, he and his slaves were on the front porch repacking some gunpowder. A spark from the father’s pipe fired the cotton about the powder, which he quickly brushed off the porch. The burning cotton fell upon little Secessia.” The young girl was burned to death.

In November of 1864, Sherman began his March to the Sea. It passed just south of Greene and spared it most of the “howling” destruction visited upon areas in its path. The most documented destruction was on the plantation of James Park, where the mill was burned. Most of the bridges over the Oconee were put to the torch and Union foragers took most of what was left of resident livestock and provisions. A detachment entered Greenesboro and marauders showed up at Scull Shoals, but both communities escaped destruction. The Federals moved on quickly. In their wake followed an army of slaves now free. Bryant states, “Sherman’s march must have seemed both tantalizing and disappointing.” Some did indeed follow Sherman’s army to the coast. Many eventually returned. Most never thought of leaving. And as 1864 gave way to 1865, most slaves plodded along in the only way they’d ever known. Even with freedom their future was at best a question mark. For as noted southern scribe C. Vann Woodward states in The Burden of Southern History, “equality was a far more revolutionary aim than freedom.” It would be tested soon enough.

The End and the Beginning .

Robert E. Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865, Joseph Johnston surrendering the only other C.S. force east of the Mississippi within the month. Scott Glass records 95 Greene soldiers as present at the surrenders. The passes these soldiers were issued following parole, guaranteeing amnesty on their return home, were proof of faithful service to the end. Many of these relics were shared with this project by the descendents of Greene County soldiers. Faithful duty is also recorded on the tombstones of over two hundred Greene soldiers who gave their lives for their cause. Rice described the post-war days. “A melancholy and sadness prevailed,” he wrote. Legend has it that Jefferson Davis, under cover of darkness, identity hidden, was lodged at Park’s Mill during his flight south; the tale extended to include the burying of C.S. treasury gold nearby. There were reports on the other side of the coin, as well: reports of slave celebrations with the news of Appomattox. Slaveowner Hardy Peek had called together his then former slaves and told them, “you all is just as free as I is … you ain’t obliged to call me old Mahster no more.” Greene, and the South was a place of conflicting emotions, charged with the arrival of occupation troops. The 175th New York, a regiment decimated early in the war and used as a reserve force, arrived in June, 1865. Stationed in Greenesboro, their district covered seven counties. Ideally, their duty was to insure stability in a volatile region. Despite vehement resentment there is only one report of violence, a Union officer being shot from a window during the first weeks of their arrival. But this was an isolated event. Greene soon settled into a post-war transformation, the presence of Federal troops less an issue than slave freedom.

In 1864, black slaves had built the Springfield Baptist Church for their own use. When the war ended, freed blacks built up a community around it called “Canaan.” Though these steps towards independence were taken, most still worked on the plantations they’d been brought up on, had their old master’s name, received their sustenance from the same landed families. With freedom, the “freedmen” now entered into written contracts based on share-wages. A “Freedman’s Bureau” was established with regional branches to assist the transitions of labor. These bureaus and the hovering threat of “Reconstruction” were highly resented by the old landed planters, most of whom were in dire straits with the loss of their property in slaves. But there was a new order on the rise. Plantations were sold off, some abandoned. Some were divided up amongst “tenants.” A new mercantile class began to emerge. Equal parts ex-large landowners and men once outside the closed class structure of plantation-based economics, these merchants, “a distinct product of the destruction of the plantation,” as described by Coulter, would oversee the conversion from plantation to a “share-cropping” agricultural structure whose support would funnel directly from mortgaging and credit. The influence of this re-organization would shift power from the country to the town. But it would not flourish until the “radicals” had been driven out.

Reconstruction and Redemption .

Andrew Johnson was sworn in as president following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in April, 1865. Johnson, like Lincoln, envisioned a magnanimous rejoining of sections following the Civil War. Johnson, a southern Unionist, met fierce, bitter resistance. Northern Republican legislators held the majority in Congress. Led by the fiery Thaddeus Stevens, they set to a brusque re-Unionization process for the former Confederate states; the most stinging condition being a voting rights forfeiture for any man who had served the Confederacy in any capacity. The actions of the time would bring “radicals, carpetbaggers, scalawags and redemption” into the lexicon of the era, all the while balancing the “freedmen” at the center of the fury.

In Greene County, as mentioned, most freed slaves continued working the only farms they’d ever known. But there were many forays into spheres of greater independence and influence. In early 1866, there was a freedman’s strike in Greene arising from contracts setting wages lower than the minimum set by the regional Bureau (headed by David Tillson, in Augusta). The local Farmer’s Bureau court was run by resident whites who brought with them inherent prejudices in dealing with their former slaves. Jonathan Dawson was its first director and per research he showed little sympathy. The strike was settled through intervention. But it had revealed a line in the sand. As Bryant states, “the oppressive contract system, the unequal laws passed by the state legislature, and the justice meted out by the county court, all accelerated the development of active political consciousness among Greene’s freed people.” In 1865, President Johnson allowed each southern state to convene a Constitutional Convention to repeal the orders of secession and amend their constitutions for re-admittance into the Union. Yelverton P. King, Miles W. Lewis, and Nathaniel Crawford (who signed the order of secession) were sent to the convention from Greene. Robert L. McWhorter and John Swann were soon after elected to the legislature late in 1865. Their efforts would prove inadequate for Steven’s “radical” bloc in Congress, and the more ambitious, emerging leaders of Greene’s freed people. A freedmen’s “Equal Right’s Association” was soon initiated. Greene’s local leader was a man named Abram Colby.

Colby, the son of a white landowner and slave, was granted his freedom in the 1850s, finding work as a barber in Greenesboro. He never learned to read or write, but had a knack for political leadership. He made the Greene ERA into an organ for equality, imploring the state legislature, “as we are willing to bury the past and forget the ills of slavery … we expect your encouragement by the creation of such laws as are equitable and progressive.” But this was not forthcoming. In March, 1866, freedman leader Henry Turner came to Greenesboro to talk to Colby’s ERA. Speaking before a large audience, Turner launched into a fiery denunciation of the freedmen’s inability to stand up to the transgression of whites. A group of whites gathered and soon grew angry over the black speaker’s audacity. Tensions ran high, Donald Grant relating the story in The Way it was in the South: “Turner defied them and went on speaking. When he urged black men in Greensboro to keep white men away from their women, whites in the audience drew their guns. Since the blacks were also armed, nothing came of this incident.” An editorial in 1868 claimed, “essential to the return of Southern prosperity is the establishment of confidence and increasing good will between the two races.” Though there are many on record as wishing nothing less, reality was not so accommodating; as “Abe” Colby would soon find out.

“Radical Reconstruction,” as the era became known, began in 1867. Congress signed into law the 14th amendment: “citizenship rights are not to be abridged,” a civil rights addition to the 13th amendment that abolished slavery. Georgia (along with most of the deep-South states) rejected it and was cast out of the Union. Its legislature was abolished and the state was put under military rule. Military leaders, many of them former Union generals, oversaw carefully picked delegates of the Republican mindset to take the place of the conservative legislators of the South. Many high offices went to northerners. The capitol was moved to Atlanta. In 1868, open elections were held. Native conservative leaders protested by non-participation. Despite a spike in white-supremacist violence, chiefly a result of the Ku Klux Klan, freedmen voted in large numbers. The resulting state legislature was a mix of opportunistic whites, a few conservatives, and the first black representatives in state and local history. Robert McWhorter and Abram Colby braved death threats, ran on the Republican ticket, and were elected.

The history of this period has often documented sectional emotion over objective review. Rice wrote, “in Greene County, just as it was in all of the South after the war, ignorant ex-slaves filled the legislative halls of Georgia and were the tools with which the “carpet-bag” Governor Bullock and his henchmen used to fleece the State.” Rice went on to describe Abram Colby as a drunken menace. As inadequate as these conclusions are, they were the prevailing view. Lost is the notion that there existed intelligent freedmen politicians after honest social gains, an obvious historical omission in failing to mention the smear campaign initiated by the Klan against Colby; who in 1870 took him from his house, beat him unmercifully, and left him for dead. Abe Colby would survive and would eventually move to Atlanta. So would survive the Klan’s reign of terror; the “law of the revolver,” as described by Bryant. But objectivity separates many freedmen leaders from the unscrupulous locals and “carpetbaggers,” white to a man, who did participate in the rampant corruption of private enterprise; most notably in bonds issuances for southern railroad development. Under military rule, despite the elected legislatures, business interests – southern and northern – took complete advantage of the political structure. The South, Georgia, and Greene, was a vast, conquered land at the mercy of economic exploitation. Taxation ran rampant and was imposed upon a populace denied the right to vote. And it spawned “redemption.”

Redemption in Georgia gained its symbolic start with the expelling of all black members from the state legislature in 1868; Colby included. There is truth in the notion that the freedmen vote was manipulated for Republican Party ends. Yet as time moved into the 1870s, no less can be said of the emerging conservative opposition: the Democratic Party. The Herald Journal was founded in 1868. “Vincit Amor Patri,” or “the cause of truth and justice and the interests of the people,” was its motto. It quickly picked up on the motivations of redemption, or “home rule,” and attempted to deflate radical influence. Raper related an editorial aimed at freedmen:

“… if those people (referring to the “carpetbag” politicians and Republican Party natives who were nicknamed “scalawags”) want you to vote, it is not because they love you; it is only because they think they can make something of you … we remember how faithful you were when you were slaves … We have not forgotten our old friendships.”

Almost as a natural course, the Reconstruction governments were failing anyway; mainly due to the results of massive capitalistic exploitation. Occupation troops had left and local whites were gaining back local judicial control through boards of commission; as well as settling into a new economy. In the end, if Reconstruction accomplished anything, then it was only to galvanize the Southern mindset and place Democratic Party loyalty alongside reverence for the “Lost Cause.” It “succeeded only in making the South more Southern,” wrote Coulter. In 1873, a bank panic caused the “radical” government in Georgia to fold. Though Reconstruction wouldn’t end until Southern electorates made it a part of the deal that would seat Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House, by the mid-1870s “home-rule” had been fully restored. As early as 1872, the elected Republicans from Greene County, Greene Thompson and Jack Heard, fielded little power. Many native Republicans, derisively called “scalawags,” began to contemplate a jump back to the Democrats, who though still banned from the electoral process were by influence, be it through the KKK or economics, undercutting Republican ends. With no where to turn, freedmen faced what Bryant described as the “terrible choice of confrontation or accommodation.” In The Burden of Southern History, Woodward wrote, “the new electorate of freedmen proved … remarkably modest in their demands … In no state did they hold place and power in anything approaching their actual numbers and voting strength.” The final foray the freedmen would make was in the 1874 elections. Predictably, it went against the Republican candidates. Results were suspect at best. Many were outraged by what seemed outright fraud. Freedmen George Battle and Montgomery Shepard chose the route of “confrontation” and led a midnight protest through Union Point. Shepard was soon sentenced to a chain-gang for his actions. He would be shot to death while attempting to escape.

A “New South” on the Horizon .

The 1870s in Greene County were indicative of the “Black Belt” South. The restructured agrarian economy saw the town and the merchant take precedence over the plantation. A casualty of this was Mercer University. Abandoning its forty year residence in the village of Penfield, Mercer officials relocated to the urban community of Macon in 1871. Bryant, in discussing another of the residual casualties of transformation – the old mills – relates, “the decline and eventual failure of the mills left Greene County more dependent than ever on the commercial market, placing merchants and lawyers at the center of the county’s economy.” Indeed, self-subsistence was a thing of the past. Since the only collateral most had would be that year’s crop, “crop-liens” or attaining credit for supplies by offering a portion of one’s crop as security, emerged as economic method. This inevitably meant that “tenants” and “sharecroppers” grew cash crops that would yield the highest return; and this meant cotton. James Park lamented, “the policy of raising all cotton and depending on the West for the stuff of life has well nigh ruined this state.” As if to underline the point, the 1880 census recorded a per capita wealth of only $113.14 in Greene. In the slave days of 1860, it had been $710.

The decade progressed, nonetheless, as normal as possible. Edward Copelan of Greenesboro, James Hart of Union Point, and William Penn McWhorter of Woodville, all sons of antebellum planters, became men of prominence. Long-time county planter Thomas Janes became the state of Georgia’s first agricultural commissioner. Charles A. Davis, called the “merchant prince,” became the most important financier in the county. In 1874, Greenesboro could boast of a marshal, seven lawyers, kerosene street lamps and a volunteer fire department. The county had fifteen practicing physicians and a dentist. Early resident of the county, Gwynn Allison, had died at a very old age, leaving behind a fund that philanthropically provided for the schooling of the poor. The fund would be a wellspring far into the twentieth century. Boosterism had begun to show itself in the form of the Greene County Agricultural and Mechanical Association. “Redeemers” championed the dual causes of southern nationalism and southern industry. In White Plains a “Negro” academy was opened by a white teacher. A year later another was opened. By 1880, the state of Georgia was second in railroad miles in the South and could claim 40 new mills. Yet there remained an underlying strain on this emerging future. It could be seen on the land. Raper noted, “the tenants owned no livestock or farm implements, had no credit, had to be furnished everything … was always in debt; even the crop the tenant had not yet harvested belonged to the landowner.” He went on, in bleak terms, “the tired land leached and washed. The gullies gnawed deeper into the red lands of Greene.” In T. B. Rice’s history of Greene, he documents his first impression of Greenesboro during his days as a traveling salesman or “drummer” in the 1880s:

"mid-summer … the streets were dry and dusty, a number of the stores were unpainted wooden buildings with wooden awnings that extended across the sidewalks with benches on the outer edges; the store windows were covered with wooden shutters"

It seems a lonely description of what seems a lonely time. Everything had changed in the life of the residents of Greene. And everything was to keep on changing, rapidly.

The new South presents a perfect democracy, the oligarchs leading in the popular movement … a hundred farms for every plantation, fifty homes for every palace, and a diversified industry that meets the complex needs of this complex age … The new South … is stirred with the breath of a new life

Henry Grady ~ from his New South speech to the New England Club of New York, 1886

Those who wish to be benefitted (sic) by a Southern climate, without enervating influences, who wish to enter upon farming operations, to establish industries or to buy land on appreciation, will find here advantageous fields.

Optimism and Pessimism .

Thaddeus Brockett Rice wrote extensively of Greene before and after the turn of the century. He described downtown Greenesboro as “rocking along pretty much in the same old way, with the same muddy streets, the same old kerosene street lamps … Back in those days the town had only one marshal, he was an expert whittler.” On October 22, 1886, the Herald Journal ran an ad for “Pemberton’s French wine of coca – the world’s great nerve tonic.” The formula, concocted by an Atlanta pharmacist, was soon to become the most famous soft drink in the world, Coca-Cola. Diversification found itself in the spiritual fabric of the county. Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, and even Catholics were represented. There were white and black churches. Masonic membership was common and also separate, white and black. There were horse races. Fairs in both Greenesboro and Union Point would tout such awards as “the best rutabega turnips.” A traveling circus visited Greene County in the 1880s. This project, the Greene County Heritage Project, came across a whimsical image of elephants being led down Main Street in Greenesboro. The play “Last Days of Pompeii” was staged in 1889 for the bargain of 50¢ admission. That same year, Edward Copelan opened “the first real bank that Greenesboro ever had.” The once miniature hamlet of White Plains, incorporated in 1867, had become one of the fastest-growing towns in Greene. Georgia RR conductor Harry Hill was the first to bring the idea of a railroad spur to the up-and-coming merchant interests of the town. By late 1889, to great celebration, the Union Point to White Plains spur was opened. The governor, Confederate hero and “redemption” leader, John B. Gordon, attended the event. The McCall Copelan Company store was then the most successful of the thriving mercantile interests within the county. The White Plains Manufacturing Co., a “blacksmith shop, wheelwright shop, grist mill, and cotton mill all in one establishment,” gained equal prominence. In the towns, prosperity showed. In the country, “tenancy” and “sharecropping” had taken over.

In 1886, Henry Grady, editor of the booster-minded Atlanta Constitution, delivered his famous “New South” speech to a group of northern businessmen and politicians in New York City. He spoke of a South that had no apologies for its part in the rebellion, but through the “inscrutable wisdom of God” had been beaten and its old method of the plantation and slavery defeated. He spoke of this “New South” based on diversification, industry, and business in tandem with the agrarian method still at the very core of southern culture. Edward Ayers in his The Promise of the New South summed up Grady’s words: “the New South had built itself out of devastation without surrendering its self-respect.” It would be a time amplified by heady optimism. Yet the reality of this period would unfold under a natural suspicion of things new, a country-borne pessimism equal parts the ire of small landowners, poor whites and poor, station-less blacks.

Small town mercantile stores became the very center of commerce and life in Greene and the rest of the South during the years prior to the turn of the century. Supplies, fertilizer, provisions, and feed were all procured on credit, the loan itself often procured from the storeowner. Democratic Party policies held an iron grip on political and, as a result, economic issues. They secured low taxes, and the absolute minimum of restrictions and government. Party patronage and loyalty stood as an unquestionable facet and allowed the establishment of an unassailable centralization of power. Ed Ayers states, “white veterans with education and property stepped forward to seize the power they considered rightfully theirs.” The Democrat’s conservative tone often carried with it a biting denunciation of all things northern. Yet within the South itself, this political machine stirred up heated resentment. Its closed network presided over a standard of living in the area based on low wages, prevailing interest-rates on credit, and absentee ownership. Blacks were held in harsh submission by this structure, Ayers stating, “all … instruments of power could be brought to bear on a sharecropper, a worker, or a customer on election day.” A result was the beginning of a migration amongst blacks from the southern countryside that would turn into a flood. Ayers describes, “young blacks left the farms for village, town, city … lending vibrancy and energy to the black community and creating an uneasiness in whites who watched from a distance.” It would continue well into the new century. Another result, in conjunction with a rural hatred of northern moneylenders, was the rise of the “People’s Party,” or “Populists.”
Agrarian Uprising .

It all began as the Farmer’s Alliance, a grassroots, rural-commerce movement rising out of Texas in the 1880s. Initiated as an alternative to the virtual slavery many small farmers felt in relation to their creditors, by 1890 the Alliance had drawn up a political platform and had spread across the rural agrarian South like wildfire. Two suspicions lay at the movement’s root: a bitter distaste for the draconian power wielded by the reigning Democrats – C. Vann Woodward in his Origins of the New South quoted a Georgia Alliance-backed paper accusing “the silk-hat bosses of deserting the wool-hat rank and file” – and a hostility towards lenders and their source: Wall Street, the very symbol of northern banking interests. By 1889, there were 104,000 Alliance members in Georgia alone. Greene County, the majority of its population of the small-landowning and tenant farming class, became a hotbed of the uprising. When Alliance-backed Democrats were soundly defeated in the elections of 1890, mainstream party loyalty having swamped this upstart challenge to the “redeemers,” the result was the splinter Populist Party.

In his essay collection Burdens of Southern History, Woodward states, southerners have a “blood-knowledge of what life can be in a defeated country on the bare bones of privation.” In no place was this more true than on the lands of the old plantation in the 1880s and early 1890s. Arthur Raper in Tenants of the Almighty states, “times were hard … for the small farmowners and landless families.” Times of such economic peril invariably give way to revolutionary and, or experimental notions. In the towns, creditors and merchants and their distant lenders grew visibly prosperous, while as early Alliance leader Leonidas Polk stated, “agriculture languishes.” With their economic and social freedoms stifled by the power structure, in a land of such rugged independence no less, Populism was destined to occur. There seemed no end to hard times, the situation of the workingman, “overwhelmed by desperate and immediate economic anxieties.” Rural cooperation and commercial power through political strength were Alliance-based ideals that would fuel their drive. Woodward wrote in Origins of the New South, “the Populist remedy was a combination of exploited colonies against the exploiting empire,” looking to “bind together all those sections the Redeemers looked to divide.” One of the revolutionary characteristics was its inclusion of black farmers. From the earliest days, the Alliance had a black wing; separate but equal. As enigmatic leader Tom Watson, later to change his tone towards a virulent brand of racism, once described “Negro” farmers to a crowd of poor white tenants: “they are in the ditch just we are.”

The vote of the black farmer was sought by both sides in the 1892 elections. The black-Alliance was by then a powerful bloc, voting in conjunction with the white Populists in numbers akin to early-Reconstruction. Still, the pressure of Democrats, many employing the threat of commercial ostracism, kept at least an equal percentage of black votes in Greene County, and elsewhere, with the conservative party. J. Kilpatrick, a respected member of the county’s black community, wrote what he viewed as common desire: “to work and save money, and try to be a people, and when white people saw that we were trying to do all these things they would respect us as a people.” The Populist Party began as offering this opportunity. But it soon looked not towards the black farmer, but simply his vote as his only benefit to the cause. In the end blacks would be cast from the movement. Legalized segregation and disenfranchisement were soon to follow, all for wanting, as Ayers documented, “a man’s chance in the world.”

Ed Ayers documented a Populist paper called the People’s Advocate that was printed-in and circulated throughout Greene. An excerpt attacks colorfully, as was the style, the local Democratic speakers prior to the 1892 election: “modern democratic orators seem to be afflicted with an acute attack of political jim-jams, a kind of political delirium tremens.” The 1892 elections went Democratic to the howling protest of Populists who claimed rampant fraud. In 1893, a bank panic struck the nation’s commercial sector. A depression resulted. The already desperate situation on the farms spiraled downward. Many now faced the specter of starvation, as well as penury. The bank panic would prove to install 1894 as the political high-water mark of the agrarian protest. That year, Tom Watson, Georgian Populist leader, spoke in Greenesboro. Despite the threat of retaliatory violence, he delivered his speech to a large, boisterous audience and was carried off on their shoulders. A few weeks later, Watson spoke in White Plains. As 1894 wore on Raper described, “the political temperature of Greene continued to rise.” The Herald Journal provided a sounding board for this rhetoric. The paper remained “open to both parties, provided courteous language is used.” Raper described, “the well-to-do townspeople and the larger planters remained within the Democratic Party … the white-land (describing the “poor” land of southern Greene) section of the county at Siloam and White Plains, Veazy and Liberty were generally active in the Populist Party.” The Democrats and Populists stoked the political fire with every speech, each “stumping” their own version of the coming reckoning. But Raper documents the low price of cotton and a Populist platform touting free schoolbooks as the two deciding factors in Greene. With a large percentage of black votes in their corner, the county election went to the Populists. Almost half the votes cast in Georgia, 44.5 %, were for Populist-backed candidates. Greene County Populists soon after their victory proclaimed it is “time for wealth to begin to bear its share of the public expenses.” The small farmer had forced economic representation on the Democratic machine. But the conditions that bred rural revolution were in flux. Things were moving forward yet looking backward for inspiration.

Into a New Century .

The Populists were in power in Greene for only a few years. By the mid-1890s, the depression having ended and cotton prices on the rise, the acute economic hardship that had spawned the uprising was on the wane. As E. Merton Coulter wrote in Georgia, the Populist movement was “killed by prosperity.” By the 1898 elections, only the county sheriff and clerk were elected as Populists. Little legislation had been passed, the most notable and lasting being Tom Watson’s Rural Free Delivery bill, passed in 1893 while Watson was a U.S. representative. Rice documents a story from one of the first RFD mailmen in Greene, M. M. Morgan. “As I stopped my old gray horse to deliver some mail, and started off, an old lady said: Mr. Morgan, I want to mail a letter and I ain’t got no money to buy a stamp, but my old hen is on the nest and she will lay in a minute or two, and just as soon as she lays I will give you the egg for a stamp.” He waited. But despite the minor progressive gain of RFD made on behalf of the small farmers, Greene and the South were sliding back, politically and economically, into the conservative-rural ethic that lay at its root. Still, agricultural diversification and the call for “progress,” the very rallying cry that had heralded this New South, returned with the recovering economy. It brought with it the age of the mill.

Cotton mills had been common since antebellum days. But the turn of the century saw a whole-scale explosion in the industry in the South. One of the main growth factors was the amount of tenants and ‘croppers that had been bankrupted in the 1890s. The mill was a constant source of income beyond the unpredictable forces of nature and fluctuating cotton prices. Many families packed up the few things they had and settled into a uniquely New South development: the “mill village.” By 1900, Greene could count the Boswell’s milling operations in Penfield, the Mary-Leila in Greenesboro, Samuel Sibley’s hosiery mill in Union Point (ancestor of Chipman Union), and the Southern Cotton Seed Oil Co. A local booster-minded editor implored, “get a move on you … let’s get out of the rut of listlessness and laziness we are in.” Rice wrote of perhaps the same editor: “The Herald Journal did its part by reminding the people how backward we were, what other towns were doing.” The proliferation of the cotton mills was the most lasting effect that the push for industrial progress in the South would have. In time, it would be the ironic spark in an industrial labor revolution not unlike the rural revolution then fading beneath the eclipse of “one-party” rule.

Most Populists returned to the Democratic Party. They were received coldly, “put in much the same position as the few scallawags had been at the end of Reconstruction,” as documented by Raper. Many Populist leaders, looking for a scapegoat, blamed the “Negro” vote, claiming they’d gone against the movement. Both parties had applied pressure and coercion on blacks, and their votes; “bought and sold like merchandise and herded around the polls like so much cattle,” as stated by Coulter. Ed Ayers, Arthur Raper, C. Vann Woodward, and Wilbur J. Cash among other notable southern historians, voiced similar conclusions. Woodward wrote, “the exciting vision of 1892, picturing black and white farmer and laborer marching together toward a new era, had by 1898 become dimmed by old prejudices and suspicions.” Tom Watson turned on the race that he believed did in his movement, and became a dangerous voice for white supremacy. James Park and Judge Henry T. Lewis drew up a county resolution that called for a reconciliation of the two parties to form a “white man’s party.” Prevalent as a certain crusade since Reconstruction, white supremacy had by the turn of the century grown into a highly organized folk movement. Wrapped around an absolute idolatry of Protestantism and the old Confederacy, actions on its behalf would be grim, crude, inhumane, and irreconcilable. It would garner active support and vehement opposition in Greene County. The “solid” South was a place of highly divisive emotions. And blacks would suffer the results of its in-fighting.

In 1895, Booker T. Washington delivered his “Atlanta Compromise” speech at that city’s Cotton Exposition. He claimed that vocational skills were the most useful educational pursuit for blacks. Through gainful employment, he claimed, the two races could live as fingers on a hand: separate yet equal. This notion was soon institutionalized. Woodward wrote that, from a political standpoint, the “repugnance for corrupt elections was put forward everywhere as the primary reason for disenfranchisement.” The socio-cultural reasons would prove to extend much deeper. By the late-1890s, voting laws were enacted based upon literacy and property. No tenant or sharecropper could vote, literacy clauses were interpreted loosely by individual election boards, and a poll tax was initiated. If one could not pay the fee, then they were ineligible. disenfranchisement denied as many whites the right to vote as it did blacks. But virtually all blacks were denied. Voting rights slid back into the antebellum method of privilege. As little as 15% of the voting age public were eligible. It was a time of tightening societal control. Extremism rode legislative mandates. Mob violence was widespread, despite an 1893 state law outlawing its barbaric by-product: lynching. The archaic convict-lease system was strengthened by legislation and brought “the temptation to convict innocent persons to provide a large labor supply,” as stated by Coulter. Convict laborers were prevalent on the farming operations at Scull Shoals. Many roadways were constructed by the “chain-gang.” “The county roads, which are worked by convicts, are in excellent condition,” was a quote found in the 1906 Cyclopedia of Georgia. Labor was a very raw issue. In 1902, R. A. “Pegleg” Williams entered the history of Greene. A labor agent for the Choctaw, Oklahoma and Gulf Railroad, Williams came to Greene to recruit black laborers. After a meeting with county officials, he began his labor drive. Records vary, but it is figured that nearly 1,000 went with Williams. His success in the labor drive, though, didn’t sit well with large planters. They had not been notified of his coming and were right then short-handed. Luther Boswell put out a warrant for his arrest, which was carried out. Williams was charged with recruiting without a license. He paid the $500 fee and moved on, with his recruits. Williams met with like trouble in nearly all the nearby counties he visited. He refused to pay the subsequent county recruiting fees and went so far as to challenge their constitutionality. He would eventually take his case all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court where a tie would uphold lower court decisions requiring a license. The case was followed with interest amongst the planters of Greene. For “Pegleg’s” labor drive was but a spike in a continuing trend. In 1900, the census listed county residents at 16,542. It had dropped over 500 since 1890. Black residents were leaving, most of their own accord. And this would continue to drain the population of the county. Still, amidst all the live wires that have come to define this confrontational era, time’s insatiable march was changing the county, the state, the nation, the world. Ayers documented a southerner almost lamenting in having stated: “the South is being drawn into the current of the world’s life.”

This New South .

The Spanish-American War, though not much of a conflict, was vigorously supported in Greene. Whites volunteered in enormous numbers throughout the South. Blacks, viewing an opportunity to prove themselves did likewise. But the war was over before most ever reached the battlefronts. American victory brought with it the responsibilities of a world superpower. The advancement of the culture was championed. Raper documented a 1903 grand jury that resounded “with a great deal of pride the enterprising spirit which is being manifested in almost every section. Good churches, well equipped schoolhouses, and first class roads will always be the best index to civilization.” In 1888, the state created a tax for use in public schools. By 1900 it was having an effect, Rice having stated, “neighborhood schools began to spring up.” “Negro” schools, called “Normals,” went up in northern Woodville, the northeast community of Public Square, and in Union Point. Though under funded, four dollars to one in comparison to white schools, many heeded Washington’s advice; be it “separate yet equal,” or not. The first “school bus” appeared in the north county hamlet of Greshamville in 1900, the county purchasing a two-horse wagon and harness to haul white students to school at “public expense.” School districts were set up within the county so as to levy taxes for schooling evenly and fairly. Virtually every community, small like Harmony Grove or large like Greenesboro, had a small, usually one-room schoolhouse.

Women had been active in a movement then gathering steam throughout Greene and the South. Begun in the 1880s, the Prohibition Movement was by 1900 hailed as a “crusade.” The “desire, determination, and hard work” of women of the day was, as noted by Ayers, “forced into narrow channels.” Ayers continued, “Politicians sneered. Husbands balked. Colleges turned their backs.” Many women, looking for constructive outlets set to writing “local color,” a literary movement of the day which made Joel Chandler Harris, Eatonton native, and his “Uncle Remus” stories world famous. Women had to submit their stories under a man’s pen-name for any hope of publication. Women’s options were limited, possibly helping to create the dogged, determined success that would visit the Prohibition movement by the 1910s. Suffrage would be right on its heels. Black women found their options even more scarce, and more rigorous, Ayers describing their situation succinctly: “… a man’s share in the field, and a woman’s share at home.”

Technology was slowly making its way into Greene. The first telephone appeared in 1897. Raper records the J. B. Dolvin family of Siloam as having a bathtub and a telephone by 1906. The Wray family, living near Greshamville in a crossroads named for them, Wrayswood, had acetylene gas lights and running water by 1910. Technology of a more high-powered sort came to the county in 1900. In May, a group of California astronomers, the Dolbeer Eclipse Expedition, handpicked the small village of Siloam as the best geographic location in the country to observe the eclipse of May 28th. The Greene County Heritage Project’s wonderful supporter, Mrs. Eugenia Veazy, wrote, in 1984, an account of the event as described to her by her grandparents: “they camped out in the back yard of Mr. and Mrs. Ezekial J. Stanley. The California scientists and their strange equipment aroused much interest and speculation among the townspeople.” Ms. Veazy wrote of county residents who were not aware of the coming phenomenon, stating, “some thought the world was coming to an end.” Far from coming to an end, it was the dawning of a new age.

The 1906 Cyclopedia of Georgia recorded Greensboro (the “e” dropped about this time due to a post office error) as by far the largest town, its population at 1,511. Union Point was second with 487. Penfield – 375, Woodville – 300, White Plains – 290, Siloam – 210, and Greshamville with 100 followed. The common town had mercantile interests and was a trading center. They had a “money order” post office with rural free delivery, an “express” office, a telegraph office despite the arrival of telephone, as well as banks and even small power plants in the larger towns. The county was still rural, with the majority of the population remaining on their farms. Rice noted, “many of the men who fought in the Confederate Army were still active.” Grants to Confederate veterans and their widows were listed at 172 about this time, a total of $10,000 paid as pension to defenders of what was by then, the mythical “Lost Cause.” A new era in the character of the county began about this time. James C. Williams, beloved “Uncle Jimmy” as the future editor of the Herald Journal would be known, began working at the paper. Williams would become, in the great tradition of early twentieth-century southern journalists, a respected voice of reason in defense of that which was right and a fearless voice against that which was not. Rice, a man who no doubt knew him well, wrote, “Uncle Jim was always optimistic when it was needed most.”

Still, the optimism common amongst the white population of the county at the time had another side. For the “aughts” was a time of uneasy stasis. The case of Plessy v. Ferguson, arising from a challenge to the southern states’ “Jim Crow” racial segregation of railcars, had been taken all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court having delivered its controversial “separate yet equal” verdict. The ruling created a mad run in state legislatures across the South to rewrite and adopt laws that “legalized” the segregation of the races. Woodward stated in Origins of the New South, “the walls of segregation and caste were raised higher and higher by law and custom … It was a time when the hope born of Reconstruction had all but died for the Negro.” From transportation to public restaurants and facilities, from civic gatherings and walking on sidewalks to funding for education and the right to vote, African-Americans were cast into a subservient lower class role. Most in the county were still tenants and sharecroppers. And with segregation now a formal rite throughout the South, their impoverished, indebted state grew more to represent slavery than at any point since the end of the Civil War. Isolationism of the races legalized what had been a very distinct traditional line between two cultures in the South since colonial days. Yet in legalization, as was noted by Ayers, “it seemed to many observers, black and white, that the two races grew farther apart every year.” Ayers went on, describing this rift heightened by legalized segregation: “More blacks and whites than ever before … lost faith in one another.” And despite the reform-minded progressive winds then sweeping the country, including honest gains being made in the region in areas such as education, agricultural diversification, public health, and child labor, as Woodward noted the combined problems were more “than Southern resources, philanthropy, and good intentions could solve.”

In Greene, the new century plodded along with little outside of daily routine to distinguish one day from another. Farming operations were struggling and everywhere it seemed residents, black and white, were looking for alternatives to the traditional agrarian lifestyle. Raper documented, “the disintegration of plantation farming was most marked in the Oakland and Penfield sections (northern “red-land” area once known as Prosperity Ridge for its abundant plantations) … Away to the cities of the South and nation went many members of planter families; stranded landless workers drifted off to towns and cities of Georgia.” Ed Ayers wrote of a John Briggs, who after receiving a theology degree came to Greensboro to pastor, only to move his family to North Carolina for lack of any sustaining income. Briggs said, “the wealthy members are dead and have moved to Atlanta.” Raper went on to document, “soil resources were being used up, fertilizer costs were mounting.” In 1911, a Greensboro attorney named James Davison, who had ironically headed the defense of “Pegleg” Williams, addressed the grand jury. He stated, “the condition of the man on the farm is worse than it was thirty years ago.” Yet Davison was not simply lodging criticism. He foresaw a new opportunity. He “saw how exhausted and weary uplands (could) be redeemed to productivity.” His notion centered around support from state and federal agencies (a multi-agency partnership that Arthur Raper would be known for in Greene during the 1930s and early 1940s) for eradication of the dreaded “Texas Fever Tick.” In ridding the county of the insect, lay the whole-scale redemption of agricultural pursuits in Greene through the growth of beef and dairy cattle interests. Gracious hosts and supporters of the Greene County Heritage Project, the Curtis family, would, following World War II, become one of the more successful families in the county through their diversified cattle farms. Yet whether this would be enough to deliver the county from the stagnancy of the mid-1910s, time could only tell. It would, in the very near future, be overshadowed by world war.