Lisa M. Russell - Lost Towns of North Georgia

Published by The History Press

Charleston, SC

www.historypress.net

Copyright 2016 by Lisa M. Russell

All rights reserved

Front cover: Young girls like these were Lunch Toters. While this photograph was taken in Columbus, Georgia, children like these could be found in the mills selling their baskets to workers. Too young to work in the mill like their older siblings, they could still make money and contribute to the familys survival. Photograph by Lewis Hine. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-DIG-nclc-02816.

First published 2016

e-book edition 2016

ISBN 978.1.43965.827.7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016939333

print edition ISBN 978.1.46713.651.8

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For Mimis precious girl,
Charlotte Christine Russell.

FOREWORD

I was quite excited when Lisa Russell first asked me to write the foreword for her book about the lost towns of North Georgia. The reason for my excitement was simple: I like old towns. I like the feel of them and the aura of living history that surrounds them. When I walk the downtown streets, I can sense the shuffling steps of those who came before me and hear the quiet murmurs of townsfolk long departed. I was raised in a small town in northern Alabama, an old town with a long memory. That town is as much a part of my past as my family. But that town, like so many small towns on the rural landscape, is fading away. It is half the size it was when I was a boy, and in another sixty years it will likely be gone altogether. That is the way of towns. They are born, they grow and sometimes, like their occupants, they flourish; these towns become cities. Other times, also like their human inhabitants, towns grow old, wither and fade away. It is to those towns, gone and mostly forgotten, that the author has turned her attention.

Human beings are social by necessity as well as inclination. We are individuals by birth, but alone we are not complete. We tend to seek out others of our own kind and to congregate. It is said that our earliest ancestors did this because there was safety and security in numbers, and that was no doubt true. Hungry bears and neighboring tribes would be more likely to avoid large groups and seek easier targets. But I believe that an additional reason why our forbearers gathered together was that they were seeking the psychological comfort of the group. Simply put, it is not in us to live the solitary life. So one becomes two, and two becomes five, and five becomes many more and, eventually, a town is born.

Towns are and always have been the canvas on which the portrait of humanity is painted. They are the fabric of civilization. Towns are living entities, each unique in its own particular complexity while at the same time similar to the rest. This quote from my first novel, The Front Porch Prophet, illustrates the point about towns and their characteristics:

A thousand souls reside in the town of Sequoyah, Georgia, sixty miles southwest of Chattanooga. Located in a mountain valley, Sequoyah does not differ significantly from countless other small communities dotting the Southern landscape. It has a store and a gas station, a diner and four churches. It boasts a school, a post office, a traffic light, and a town hall. There is a doctor, a lawyer, and an Indian chief, or at least, that is what he claims. Over the years, however, the settlement has developed a character unique to itself. The whole has exceeded the sum of the parts. The individuals who have resided there have left traces, pieces of the patchworks of their lives. A childs name. A house. The lay of a fencerow. A snowball bush. This is the way of towns and of those who people them. These are the relics of security, for it is not human nature to live alone.

Although Sequoyah is a fictional town, it is based on some of the small southern towns I have lived in and traveled to during my years on this earth. And it resembles the towns that Ms. Russell explores in this book. Sometimes there is just a name left, a piece of a building or some rusty railroad tracks, or maybe a story told by a great-grandmother that she heard as a girl, but with these pieces of the past, the author resurrects towns that once were and makes them live again.

RAYMOND ATKINS is a two-time winner of the Georgia Author of the Year. His books include The Front Porch Prophet, Sweetwater Blues, Sorrow Wood, Camp Redemption, and South of the Etowah: A View from the Wrong Side of the River.

PREFACE

Shattered and scattered on a dirt floor were remnants of an eighty-nine-year-old stained-glass window. In 2000, Cassville Baptist Church decided to remove a 1911 window that was in danger of falling out. Concerned about safety, leadership decided to remove it. Members concerned with historic preservation voiced their opposition. It was removed anyway and placed in the church barn. Leaders invited members to go to the barn and take pieces of the window, fragments of history.

On a cool afternoon, my friend Darcy and I visited the old barn to find a piece of stained-glass nostalgia. Darcy was a skillful picker. She found magnificent whole pieces of glass she could display. I settled for the shards and odd broken pieces.

Not sure what to do with my salvaged slivers, I put them in a box and waited to create new art. I put the one-hundred-year-old glass on a shelf in a box. Sometimes, I would take out the box and shake the splintered pieces, wondering what I could make out of it. The debris in my box once diffused light, but these dusty pieces shed light on nothing.

I thought about those glass pieces as I began assembling the stories for Lost Towns of North Georgia. Piecing together history bits, I struggled to shine light on these fragmented stories. Finding clear information about the lost towns was sometimes easy and a matter of record. Other towns seemed to hide because information was scarce.

I am grateful for local authors who preserved the stories of Auraria and Cassville. The digital records left me hungry and searching for more. I compiled digital news piles from various corners of the web about these lost towns. I unearthed shards of facts and bits of stories, shaking around fragments of history in my head. But in my head is where they stayed.

Cassville was particularly intriguing. Daily driving through the shadows of a town, I was haunted by what remained and what we do not know. It was time to look closer, dust off the box and look at the story pieces again.

These are not my stories to tell; they belong to history. I take that responsibility seriously and research with care. The task was overwhelming, but I realized that fragmented history might be lost.

Maya Angelou said, There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. Angelou was talking about people, but I believe places have a story to tell as well. The lost towns of North Georgia cry out from the red clay or watery graves, hoping someone remembers. Visiting these vanishing villages, abandonment lingers.