SUMPTERVILLE

The Ghost Town of Laurens

Two centuries ago, Sumpterville became our first ghost town.  Laurens County, Georgia was established by the Georgia Legislature on December 10, 1807.  It was a county without a county seat.  The first court sessions were held in 1808 in the home of Major Peter Thomas on the Lower Uchee Trail in northwestern Laurens County.  As the county government began to organize, a more central location for the county seat became a prime goal. A committee chose a site, well centered in the county, but a site which, within two years, would be mostly abandoned and forgotten.

When Laurens County was  created, it stretched from its present location on the west side of the Oconee River southwest to Hartford on  the Ocmulgee River, and  included parts of present day Dodge, Bleckley, Pulaski and Wheeler counties.

The justices of the Inferior Court,  analogous to a mixture of today’s Probate Court and the County Commissioners, appointed a committee, which included John Fullwood,  to seek out and find a suitable location for the county courthouse.   The main goal of the committee was to choose a location on level ground near an abundant water source.  It was imperative that the site be situated near the center of the county and on an existing thoroughfare.  

The committee settled on a flat area along or near what later became “The Chicken Road.” This road was actually a major trail leading from Hartford on the Ocmulgee in a more or less direct line to present day Dublin.  The other dominant trail, the Lower Uchee Trail, traversed the western and northwestern limits of the county crossing the river at Blackshear’s Ferry.  The chosen site was not far from the old Indian trading path which ran from Indian Springs through Macon and onto Savannah. (Left photo by Don Johnston).

The spot chosen was Land Lot 39 of the First Land District of Laurens County.  Interestingly the 202.5 acre land lot had just been purchased by John Fullwood in November 1808 for the  sum of $1000.00 or approximately $5.00 per acre.  The fertile oak and pine lands along Turkey and Rocky Creeks were highly coveted by early settlers who swarmed to the western part of Laurens County.  

Following  the tradition of the day, the new county seat was named in honor of a hero of the American Revolution.  Laurens County was named for Col. John Laurens, a top aide to Gen. George Washington and a native of South Carolina.  General Thomas Sumter (LEFT)  was the chosen honoree for the name of the first county seat.  Sumter preferred to leave the “p” out of his name.  The justices chose to leave the letter in. And, the town of Sumpterville, Georgia was born.  Gen. Sumter, known as “The Carolina Gamecock,” was admired for his fierceness in the battles  in upstate South Carolina.  Described by Gen. Cornwallis as his “greatest plague,” Sumter was  one of the models for Benjamin Martin, the protagonist of the movie, “The Patriot.” 

For a year or so, public sales and court sessions were held at Sumpterville, possibly in the home of John Fullwood.  Presiding over the court during that time was Judge Peter Early, who would later become Governor of Georgia.  Bids were taken in the spring for the building of a courthouse and a jail. Lots were sold to the public on May 26, 1811, but no  deeds were delivered to the purchasers.   When plans changed, those who bought lots were issued refunds. Fullwood, himself a justice of the Inferior Court,  was finally  paid $36.00 for building the courthouse on his own land by the  Court in August 1811.   

After losing a good part of their county in 1808 to Pulaski County, many Laurens Countians fixed their eyes on acquiring replacement lands on the east side of the Oconee River.   In 1811, a bill was finally passed annexing portions of Washington and Montgomery counties.  At that point, Sumpterville was no longer in the center of the county.  In anticipation of acquiring new lands for a new county seat, county officials had already focused their sights on a broad ridge overlooking the Oconee River at a place formerly called Sand Bar and called Dublin by its founder, Jonathan Sawyer, who operated a store and post office there.     The courthouse in Sumpterville was abandoned.  

The town of Sumpterville became an abysmal failure.  By Christmas 1811, public sales were being held in Dublin.  In 1824, Fullwood was reimbursed for building another courthouse in Dublin.   Fullwood, Laurens County’s state seantor from 1812-1814,  never transferred the lots at Sumpterville to the county, but he did hedge his bets by investing in several hundred acres of land just north of Dublin, where he erected a large and successful grist mill on the waters of Hunger and Hardship Creek.

John Fullwood, a teen-age soldier of the American Revolution,  erected his plantation plain home at Sumpterville along a road lined with  live oaks, reminiscent of the coastal regions of Georgia.   Eventually, Fullwood’s home would become a stage coach stop when stages were the predominate method of long range transportation from the 1820s to the Civil War.  

In the 1820 Census, there were thirty persons in the Fullwood household engaged in agriculture on the two-thousand acre plus plantation.  Forty-nine of the fifty- six persons living at Sumpterville were slaves.  By 1850, more than seventy slaves called Sumpterville home.   Fullwood, one of the founders of the Laurens County Academy, the county’s first school,  died at sixty-four in  1828.  He is buried in the cemetery to the rear of his home. His estate went to his widow Mary, who married Andrew Hampton, a wealthy landowner who lived a short distance to the west.  After Andrew Hampton died, Mary married the super wealthy Henry P. Jones, of Burke County.  

All the while, both Mary Fullwood Hampton Jones and her third husband Henry Jones continued to buy more and more land, amassing a plantation of more than five thousand acres. When Mary and Henry died, the Sumpterville plantation passed to the Shewmake family, including John T. Shemake, of Augusta, who was serving as Attorney General of Georgia. Although the Shewmake family established a factory on their plantation which they called the Sumpterville Factory, the area  became more popularly dubbed “Shewmake,” When the Macon, Dublin, and Savannah Railroad was cut through the area in the early 1890s, a depot was established on the road at the point where it crosses the present I-16 highway.  

In 1894,  the Sumpterville site was acquired by J.B. Tyre, one of Laurens County’s first farm agents.  It is believed that Tyre added the western wing of the Fullwood house, which still stands today.   Tyre also established an inn in his house about a century ago.   Wallace W. Walke acquired the farm in 1930 and established Walke’s Dairy, giving the adjoining road its current name. 

Today, the Fullwood home and some of the  magnificent live oaks which lined the old stage road still remains.  Just west of a historical marker placed on the site by the John Laurens Chapter of the N.S.D.A.R. is a small wooden building which has fallen to the hallowed ground and  thought by some to have been the first Laurens County Courthouse.  To this point, no one has come forward with any definitive proof that this decaying structure was our first courthouse.  Nor have they completed discounted that it was not.   For now I’ll print the legend. 

PHOTO BY DON JOHNSTON

PHOTO BY DON JOHNSTON

PHOTOS BY IRENE R. CLAXTON 

ORIANNA

Good Folks at Home 

  The community of Orianna is what was once called a line town.  Situated in both Laurens County and Treutlen County, the community was split by political boundaries, but in a united effort overcame its lawless reputation to become a home for good folks.  Orianna was established as a post office one hundred and seven years ago today on May 16, 1899.  Lucien Thigpen served as the first postmaster.  Dora (Mrs. John M.) Thigpen took over the duties of the postmaster on March 8, 1900 and served until December 15, 1904 when all mail was ordered to be sent to Adrian.  Postmasters had the privilege of naming their post offices.  Lucien Thigpen chose the name of Orianna, which was derived from the Latin word meaning "golden" or "dawning," a highly appropriate choice at the dawning of the 20th Century.

In the latter part of the 1890s, the Macon, Dublin, and Savannah Railroad, which had been completed into Dublin in 1891, began acquiring the necessary rights of way to continue its railroad to Vidalia, where the road would connect with another which lead to the port of Savannah.  At the same time, Thomas J. James was planning a railroad, known as the Wadley and Mt. Vernon, which would run from Wadley, in his home county of Jefferson, through Kite, Meeks, Adrian, Orianna, Rockledge, and onto Mt. Vernon, a commercial center of southeast Central Georgia.   The railroad continued to operate into the 1920s when it folded for lack of use.

At the end of the first decade of the 20th Century, Orianna was known as a den of wickedness cultivated by gambling and illegal liquor sales.  Good people had been staying away.  Orianna was so far out in the boondocks that once law enforcement officials arrived from Dublin or Mt. Vernon, the rogues had run away from the scene of their crimes.  Despite the evil influences, good people started to come to Orianna to farm her fertile lands.  Newcomers joined with old timers and drove the scoundrels away.

The centerpiece of the Orianna community was the local school.   A fine school was a necessity for attracting residents to the area.  Line schools, schools which were supported by two counties, were generally underfunded and consequently understaffed.  But the Orianna school was an exception.    Local residents supplemented state and county funding by hiring the best teachers they could afford.   Smaller area schools were consolidated into one large school.    The driving force at the school was teacher J..L. Poston, who later became the principal.  The project was a success, but area residents wanted an even better facility.

The original one room school became woefully inadequate to meet the needs of the burgeoning school population.  The school boards of Laurens and Montgomery counties appropriated a third of the cost toward the new school forcing the community to raise the remainder of the three thousand dollar price tag.   Nearly everyone responded resulting in one of the most modern and handsome schools in that section of the state.  Behind the leadership of school trustees J.E. Page, J.A. Youngblood and E.A. Avery of Laurens County, and B.B. Thigpen, J.A. Curry and R.B. Avery of Montgomery County, the new facility became the envy of schools everywhere.

The new school, completed in the summer of 1913,  was well finished with four large classrooms, each of which was equipped with a blackboard, teacher's desk, heater and modern desks.  Two of the rooms were separated by a folding wall, which when thrown open, converted the rooms into the school auditorium.  Each of the teachers enforced the lessons of morality and principles of everyday life.  Normally teachers were forced to obtain quarters from area residents either for free or pay from a portion of their relatively pitiful salary.  But the school trustees arranged for erection of an adequate dormitory for the teachers, which was placed on the edge of the expansive four acre school yard.  The new venture was so successful that within the first term after its construction, the trustees considered adding a second floor to the building.

Equally important as the school to Orianna were her two churches, one Baptist and one Methodist.  The Baptist Church, through its trustees J.M. Hattaway and J.A. Curry, acquired its first church property from P.M. Johnson on August 21, 1903.  The land adjoined Rose Hill School.   W.H. Toler and his wife Elmina Rebecca Braswell Toler donated the land for the Methodist Church in the northern part of town on October 11, 1910.  Most of the two hundred fifty citizens of the community were church going people.    The prohibitionists in the community decided that a temperance union was the best weapon to fight the abundance of "blind tigers," a name given to establishments which illegally sold spiritous liquors.  Leading the fight was a young man by the name of L.O. Mosely.   In a short decade, Mosely's star soared when he became the secretary to Congressman W.W. Larsen of Dublin and later as a writer for the Atlanta Constitution and as manager of the finest hotels in Atlanta.  Moseley obtained the written pledges of every member of the community to refrain from the use of tobacco, whiskey and profanity.

Some of the early families who lived in the environs of Orianna were the families of Jonathan and Julia Smith, John M.  And Dora Thigpen, Lucien and Sarah Thigpen, Willis and Mary Beckworth, Richard and Elsey Thigpen, Thomas and Pearcy Frost, Jordan and Julia Norris, Howard and Orley Courson, Andrew and Laura Thigpen, James and Sallie Hammons, Walter and Pansy Thigpen, A.L. and Kate Thigpen, Sol and Wannie White, John W. and Trudie Greenway, Mack and Elene Foskey, J.S. and Mary McDaniel, William and Minnie Pope and Lewis and Mary Pope, as well as the families of W.H. Toler, J.A. Youngblood, W.F. Avery, E.A. Avery, G.W. Spivey, J.D. Wilson, W.W. Dent, J.A. Curry, John Gillis, Ben Gillis, J.T. Blankenship, Emmett Thipgen, J.J. Leach, J.T. May, J.R. Clements, F.M. Youngblood, J.H. Bailey, W.V. Thigpen, J.B. Ricks, H.L. Hicks, J.C. Flanders and Hardee Thigpen.

One of the area's most famous residents was the venerable Methodist minister, the Rev. Bascom Anthony, who lived northeast of Orianna on the Thigpen Trail and Wadley Southern Railroad where it crossed the southern bank of Pendleton Creek.

Today, the Orianna community is only a faint shadow of its past nearly a century ago, but one thing remains constant.   The Methodist Church is gone, but the Baptists still gather on Sundays.  And the good folks, they're still there.