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.

INGLEHURST SUBDIVISION

Old Times in the Old South

Once upon a time ours was a land of gallant gentlemen and fair ladies.  Gaiety and opulence were commonplace.  It was almost like another world, where the elite lived in luxury and the slave toiled to serve his master.  It was almost like a dream now. No one is alive who remembers the time before the war.   Few even survive who listened to  first hand  tales of the old South.  When the South collapsed following the Civil War, some memories endured, particularly on one Twiggs County plantation.

Inglehurst was built before the Civil War by Dr. Henry Bunn and his wife Nancy Thorp.  Their daughter Harriet Maria Bunn married first to General Hartwell Tarver, for whom the community of Tarversville is named.  Bunn was an early minister of Richland Baptist Church.  Harriet remarried to Frederick Davis Wimberly.

Bunn built his home in one of Georgia's wealthiest rural communities, one which was home to the Tarvers, Wimberlys, Slappeys, Faulks, Bunns, Solomons and Glovers.  Of typical colonial style ante bellum construction, this magnificent home featured a separate library, which housed many important books and manuscripts and was decorated with portraits of the Wimberly and Bunn families.  One striking feature of the interior of the main house was the mahogany paneling, which was taken from Dr. Bunn's ancestral home in Virginia along with pine and oak boards from his own plantation.

After the Civil War, the home was occupied by Frederick Davis Wimberly, Jr., a son of Frederick Davis Wimberly, but a step son of Harriet Bunn Tarver Wimberly.  Just after his graduation from Mercer University, Wimberly was elected a second lieutenant in the local company.  For gallantry in action at the cataclysmic battle of Sharpsburg, Lt. Wimberly was promoted to captain of his regiment.  Wimberly returned to a home which had escaped the torches of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's army but one which had not escaped the ravages of economic depression.  His bride of five years, Miss Isrelene Minter, was a daughter of Col. William F. Minter, who was killed in the last battle of the Civil War at the age of sixty.

The oldest child, William Minter Wimberly, was born just as his father's regiment was engaged in vicious fighting in Northern Virginia and Maryland.  Warren, the second son, was born at the end of the war.  Clara, the couple's first daughter, was born in 1868.  The second girl, Isrelene was born two years later.  The last Wimberly child, Frederick Davis Wimberly, III, was born in 1874.

Life on Inglehurst Plantation was tough, but not quite as tough as on the surrounding smaller plantations and farms.  Many of the family's slaves remained on the plantation, serving in the house and operating tenant farms surrounding the main house.  William Minter Wimberly went on to a successful political and legal career.  He was most well known as the counsel for the Macon, Dublin and Savannah railroad and for his service  in the Georgia legislature.

Clara Wimberly grew up in the hard times following the war.  Still surrounded by many of the plantation's former slaves,   Clara observed the customs of her family's servants and workers.  It was said the Clara inherited all of the charms and hospitality of the south's finest women.  

On a trip to New York to visit relatives, Clara attended a performance of Negro songs, which despite the distinctive nasal tones, fondly reminded her of the days of her youth.  Clara increasingly became interested in the customs of the Negro.  She told stories in their dialect adding a banjo to her monologues to capture their musical heritage.    She reminisced about the days of Inglehurst after the war.   One of her most well received skits was "Ole Miss and Sweetheart," in which she portrayed the stereotypical mammy of the old South.  Playing a mammy came easy to Clara, who drew upon her memories of her own mammies.  The "Ole Miss" in the story was her own mother.  During the war, Miss Isrelene  presided over Inglehurst.  She became President of the Soldier's Aid Society.  It was said that "no one, white or black, whatever his condition, was ever turned empty handed from her door, and at her board, where governors and senators have sat as honored guests, the wandering pilgrims of the road have received always an ever tendered courtesy."

Clara was fascinated with customs of the Negro, especially their dances like "The Cake Walk" and "The Holy Dance."  She began to develop artistic interpretations of poetry, prose and song.  Her interest became so intense that Clara packed her belongings and headed to New York where she planned to pursue a career as an impersonator of female Negroes.  

Just as she arrived in New York, she received word that her mother was gravely ill.  Clara rushed home and comforted her mother until her death in 1906.  Other relatives returned home for a brief period of mourning, only to hastily return to their own homes.  Clara loved Inglehurst.  She couldn't leave.  Just like her mother, it was her duty to maintain the home during times of trouble.  

But something was wrong.  As she walked through the dark house, it's windows shuttered with the pall of her mother's death. There was no joy and no music.  The house's dutiful servants stoically carried out their daily chores.   Clara soon realized that she had enough of gloom and depression, and with her gentle, but firm, voice, ordered all of the windows thrown open.  She restored the library and spent many fond times there.  The servants were revived "now that Miss Clara was carrying the keys to the house, just like her mother, whom they affectionately called "Ole Miss." Aided by her brother, Dr. Warren Wimberly, Clara restored the home to its ante bellum grandeur.   Her younger sister and an unnamed aunt also resided at Inglehurst.  

Tragically, just after Christmas in 1909, Inglehurst burned to the ground.  Not a single remnant of a memento of the family's heirlooms could be found among the ashes.   Minter and Warren died at relatively young ages.  Isrelene married Eugene Robbins and moved far away to Selma, Alabama.    With her days at Inglehurst behind her, Clara decided to settle down.  At the age of fifty-two, Clara married Mark Cooper Pope, a brother of her brother Minter's widow.  Today there are no traces of the stately Inglehurst, nothing there to remind us of the genial days of noble cavaliers and grand ladies of the Old South.

MAJOR GENERAL RENDER BRASWELL

A BORN STORYTELLER 

    They say I was born to tell stories.  I had a long and happy life.  And, I went to a lot of places around the world.  I loved to tell stories to whoever would listen to them.  There are so many stories to tell, but for now, I’ll stick to my own story.  

I was born on October 27, 1907 on the road leading from Adrian to Norristown in Emanuel County, Georgia.  My daddy was  Timothy J. Braswell, an insurance salesman and farmer.  His daddy and my grandpa, John Arthur Braswell, was known to be one of the greatest story tellers around.  He studied and read law, but never became a real lawyer.  

Grandpa Braswell used to tell the story of when he was with the Confederate Army over in South Carolina in the last few months of the Civil War.  He was only 18. He and his fellow soldiers were forced to dig out undigested grains of corn from the horse manure, just to get something to eat.  Starving, freezing  and homesick, my grandfather took a man’s horse and rode home to Emanuel County as fast as he could. 

My mother, Diva Dewberry, used to teach school over in Meriwether County. My momma and daddy split up before I was two. I moved with my mother, a beautiful and smart woman,  to Covington, Georgia.  She was later introduced to and married  Dr. Courtney Brooks, a pharmacist and later, a mayor of Covington.  

When I was only fifteen, I enrolled at the University of Georgia.  I liked science, so I got a degree in Pharmacy at Georgia at a time when most of my contemporaries were just getting out of high school.  I stayed on at Georgia and got another degree, a Bachelor in Science, four years later.  The thought of going to Medical School kept coming into my head.  So, with the help of my stepfather, I went on to Emory where I finished my studies in medicine in 1932.  At 25 years old, I was one of the youngest doctors anywhere around the state.  When I was in school, I joined Sigma Alpha Epsilon and Alpha Kappa Kappa, a  medical fraternity. 

After finishing my internship at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, I made a career change.  In fact, my decision to join the Army would change my life forever.

As a newly commissioned second lieutenant, I was ordered to report to Fort McPherson, where I was appointed the Chief of Surgery.  I went back to school at The Medical Field Service School in Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania before I was sent overseas to Manila in the Phillippines, where the Army made me Assistant Chief of Surgery in the Sternberg General Hospital.  

Just after Valentine’s Day in 1938, I married Elizabeth Willingham, the most beautiful and wonderful woman, I had ever seen.  We got married in a real big wedding in St. Philip’s Cathedral  in Atlanta.  We had a grand time traveling all across the country on our honeymoon, before we traveled to the Philippines to make our first home.  

Just before the war began in 1941, Elizabeth and I were sent back to the states, where I was assigned as Assistant Surgeon at Walter Reed Hospital.  Soon they chose me to become a member of the American College of Surgeons.  They say I was the youngest doctor ever to receive that  prestigious honor.  

I decided I wanted to serve in the Army Air Corps.  My first assignment came as a Commander and Chief of Surgery at the base at Big Springs, Texas.  In September 1943, I was promoted to a position at the Air Force Cadet Center in San Antonio.  I took some time to attend the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. 

Then just as the war was winding down in Europe but heating up in the Pacific, the Air Force sent me to serve as the Command Air Surgeon of the 20th Air Force in Guam.

Our planes flew almost every day or night, bombing the island of Japan.  Tens of thousands of the Japanese people were dying every day when our bombers dropped bombs which exploded and ignited fires that  wiped out many Japanese cities.  Then on August 6, 1945, the course of the war changed forever.  

I was called in to examine the pilot of a B-29 who had just returned from the most important mission of the war.  It may have been the most important military mission of all time.  My patient was Col. Paul Tibetts.  His plane was the Enola Gay.  You know, it was the plane which dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan.  That almost ended the war right there.

I was at the hospital  in Iwo Jima when they brought Col. Tibetts in to see me.  The Air Force was concerned that the rashes on his body may have come from atomic radiation.  I went over every  part of his body.  I finally figured out the rashes were actually scratches from the dirt and grit which were blasted up from the ground and went through the Colonel’s flight suit.

My wife and I returned to the states in May 1946, when I  was assigned as Commander and Chief of Surgery, Keesler Field Hospital in Mississippi. After a little more than a year, we moved to Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, with the same duties as I had at Keesler. 

In 1952, I was assigned as an air surgeon in the Third Air Force.  We enjoyed our stay in London, before once again we came back home, When we returned to the US, I went to work as a surgeon for the Military Air Transport Service. 

My colleagues gave me a great honor when I was recognized for my professional attainment in the field of aviation medicine.  My uniform was filled with all sorts of medals.  I was given a Legion of Merit for my work in Iwo Jima and an oak leaf cluster for my time as Command Surgeon of the  World-wide Military Air Transport Service.  I got Air Force commendations for my surgical work at Maxwell and as the Senior American Medical Officer in the United Kingdom from 1952 to 1954.  They gave me three battle stars for the time I served in the South Pacific during the war. My greatest award came when the Air Force gave me a Distinguished Service Medal.

After I retired from the Air Force as a Major General, I went to work as a Medical Director of General Motors in Atlanta.  I later went into practice with my half-brother, Dr. Courtney Brooks.   

My darling Elizabeth died in 1971.  Elizabeth and I had three fine children, Stephen, Thomas and Elizabeth.  Some three years later, I married Lillian Cox Dawes de  la Fuente in Atlanta. 

I died on May 20, 2001.  They buried my body in Section 5 of Arlington National Cemetery.  The Air Force gave me one grand send off into the skies of heaven.  I can’t remember if I ever wanted to be a lawyer like most of the men story tellers in my family.  But, the government buried me in a crowd of Supreme Court Justices.  They are a right smart bunch of fellows.  Sometimes they get together and talk about the law.  And the stories they tell, well you can’t make up these tales.  Right around me are Chief Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Warren Burger, and others like Thurgood Marshall and four more Associate Justices. 

You can’t see them from my grave, but not too far from me, a few hundred feet or so,  and just across a small hill out of sight of the Justices and myself are the Kennedy boys;  Joseph, John, Robert and Edward.  Boy, do those Yankees  have a good time when they all get together! I can’t they say what they do.  After all, one of them was my commander in chief for a thousand  days. And what happens in Arlington, stays in Arlington.  

Well, folks this is my story.  Obviously, I couldn’t speak to you directly. So, I asked my first cousin Claudie Braswell Thompson’s grandson, Scott Braswell Thompson, Sr.,  to tell my story. He’s a hopeless storyteller  like me.  He got it from his daddy, Dale, who was another one of us who every time you see one of us Braswells, we’ve got a story or three to tell.  

TO THY KINGDOM COME

The people of Meeks, Georgia were in general, regular, faithful, church going folk. And they believed that when their lives were over, they would go to God’s kingdom.  

That thought was not in the heads of the Odom brothers as they were playing around the sawmill of Linton Hutcheson near the town of Meeks, in southeastern Johnson County.  It was a cool, cloudy day with a slight threat of rain on the February 16, 1938, seventy five years ago this week.

Lamar Odom and his younger brother Lanier, the younger of six sons of Mrs. George R. Odom,  were supposed to be in school that day.  Maybe they were playing hooky and maybe they had a break from the school work.   The boys were playing close to the boiler, against the stern and wise advice of one of the mill hands.  

Linton Hutcheson, a former Johnson County School Superintendent, was standing nearby, talking to Remer Hatcher.  Clarence Pool, Lawton Smith, and Grover Watkins were close by, going about their business just before high noon.

Grover Watkins’ fifteen-year-old son, A.J., was firing the boiler when he noticed steam coming out of a crack.  Mill owner Hutcheson was summoned and ordered his men to allow continue operating the boiler until all the steam ran out after which they were instructed to shut down the operation, according to a report published in the Swainsboro Forest Blade.

All of a sudden and without a hint of any warning, a massive explosion blasted the mill into kingdom come.   

Lamar and Lanier Odom, ages 15 and 8, were instantly killed as they were hurled nearly a hundred feet away in an imperceptible instant, their heads partially ripped from their bodies.   Hutcheson was unharmed, though the cant hook in his hand was split into several pieces.   Remer Hatcher, just 10 days removed from his 51st birthday, was not so fortunate.  

“It was the most horrible thing I ever saw,” sobbed Grover Watkins.  

His son’s body, badly mangled and severely scalded was retrieved from a fence forty yards from where he was standing at the time of the blast. 

“Mr. Hutcheson and I were standing within a few feet of Remus Hatcher at the time of the explosion.  I could have reached out and touched him.  He was killed, but neither Mr. Hutcheson nor myself was even scratched,” concluded Watkins, who jumped into a sawdust pit and escape injury from enfilading bricks as they rained down for hundreds of yards in all directions.   

Those who witnessed the explosion felt the concussions from hundreds of yards away.  The report of the blast, which completed obliterated the mill,  was heard as far as four miles away.  Those who knew the power they saw unleashed, estimated that the detonation was the equivalent of the  explosive power of a ton of dynamite. 

To understand the massive power of the blast, the 4000- pound boiler, equivalent in weight to two Volkswagen Beetles,  was found 200 feet away.  Whole and broken bricks, as swell as splintered shards of timbers were found 500 yards from where they once formed the sawmill.  Edsel Flanders, climbed on top of the bursted boiler, waiving a handkerchief  for a Courier Herald photographer.  Five hundred feet away, a self-appointed investigator found a 200-pound section of the smoke stack which flew in the opposite direction from the boiler.   

After he gathered his wits, Hutcheson surmised that the explosion was the result of  an onrush of cold water into the boiling hot boiler.  When the water level inside of the boiler was below a critical level, the influx of cold water, resulted in the massive blast.

Curious onlookers rushed to the scene from all parts of the surrounding countryside.  To some, it looked like a war zone.  A deafening silence fell over those who gathered around when a reporter picked up a shining object. Among the bits, pieces and smithereens was what  turned out to be the lunch pail of young Watkins.   In the wake of the calamity which had rocked the town, a pair of shoes belonging to one of the Odom boys was found lying against a pillar of a nearby cotton warehouse.

Watkins and Hatcher were taken by vehicle toward a hospital in Dublin.  The less seriously injured workers, like Jonah Mathews who was hit by a flying brick,  were taken to Wrightsville for treatment.    Hatcher, a lifelong, prominent resident of Meeks, died along the way in the vicinity of Carter’s Chapel Church in eastern Laurens County.  

Young Watkins made it to Claxton Hospital in Dublin alive, but just barely.  Not soon after his arrival, he was pronounced dead by Dr. John A. Bell, who reported the horrible affair to the Dublin Courier Herald, which immediately spread the news around the state in its Wednesday afternoon edition.

Four funerals followed.

The Odom boys were buried in the Gumlog Baptist Church Cemetery in nearby Kite, Georgia.  Interestingly, their grave markers do not appear on a list of persons buried there.  Hatcher was buried, also nearby in the cemetery at Sardis Baptist Church.   Watkins was laid to rest at the cemetery of Poplar Springs Methodist Church, between Adrian and Scott.

And today, some seventy five years later, when there are few people alive who remembered that fateful February day, there are still those who have heard the stories and those who still tell the stories,  stories of the day that the Kingdom came down from the heavens to take four of their men and boys home.

WILLIAM ROUNTREE

Emissary from Emanuel

William Rountree made his life as he  traveled around the world seeking peaceful relations with the United States.  This native of Swainsboro served for more than a quarter of a century as one of our country's diplomats and  ambassadors to countries in the Middle East, Africa and South America in a time when the Earth was a ticking political, social and military time bomb.  This is his story.

William M. Rountree was born in the capital of Emanuel County on March 28, 1917 - a son of Clerk of County Court William M. Rountree, Sr. and his bride, Clyde Brannan. 

William's father died when he was still a toddler. The Rountrees remained in Swainsboro until 1923, when they moved to Atlanta, where William graduated from high school.  

After graduation, Rountree moved north to Washington, D.C., where he landed a job with the United States Treasury Department -  thanks to the assistance of Georgia Senator, Walter F. George.

In 1941, Rountree was appointed to a task force by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to formulate plans for the creation of an agency to administer the lend-lease program.  To top off his education, Rountree graduated from Columbia University just before the beginning of World War II. 

Rountree made his first major trip overseas in 1942 to Cairo, Egypt, where he worked with the British for the remainder of World War II.  It was during the war years when Rountree began to travel to most of the counties in the Middle East.

"I came back to Washington as special assistant and economic advisor to the Director of the NEA Bureau," recalled the newly appointed diplomat, who began to receive impressive assignments in Greece and  throughout the countries of the Mediterranean Sea as the United States assumed her role as the leader of the Free World. 

"I had not viewed our role as being the world's policeman, nor do I think President Truman did. But I think the responsibilities that were thrust upon us at the end of World War II required that we do many things in many parts of the world that were new to our philosophy," said Rountree in an interview with Niel M. Johnson of the Harry S. Truman Library.

In 1948, Rountree was directed to return to Washington to serve as  Deputy Director and later as Director of the Office of Greek, Turkish and Iranian Affairs. Later as Director of the Office of Near Eastern, South Asian and African Affairs, the Emanuel Countian worked with the British and other countries in stabilizing the region militarily, politically and economically.  In particular, he helped to stabilize the Middle Eastern oil industry from political agitation emanating from within and from outside the region. 

The ascent up the chain of command in the State Department  came quite easy to Rountree, who served as Counselor and Deputy Chief of Mission in Tehran from 1953 to '55 and then as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern, South Asian and African Affairs from 1955-59. Rountree's region included Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Ceylon.

President Dwight Eisenhower appointed the Georgian as Ambassador to Pakistan in 1959.  After three years, Ambassador Rountree was named by President John F. Kennedy as the new ambassador to the North African country of Sudan.  After another three-year term, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Rountree as our country's ambassador to South Africa, where he served until 1970.  Rountree's last three years of this 15-year tenure as an ambassador were spent closer to home in  South America as United States Ambassador to Brazil. 

As The Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, Mr. Rountree was deeply involved in the 1956 Suez crisis and in the 1958 uncivil tumult in Lebanon. Just before Christmas in 1958, a roguish mob threw eggs, mud balls and rocks at him in effort to force him out of Iraq. Of all of situations which Ambassador Rountree had to deal with, the most difficult was the tense relationship with Iran.  

"We always had influence with the Shah, but not a compelling influence. That is, the Shah always valued his relations with the United States, and enjoyed, during his life, remarkably good relations with every American administration," Rountree recalled. 

"Many people overestimate the extent to which American influence can be effective in any given country. Our advice to the Shah over the years could have been better, but on the other hand, if the Shah had adhered to the advice which he received from us, Iran would have been in a much better position at the time of the his demise. In other words, I do not go along with the idea that his failure was the result of the lack of good advice from the United States," the Ambassador concluded.

While serving as Ambassador to South Africa in the late 1960s,  Rountree had to deal with the bitterly divisive issue of Apartheid.

"The United States has strongly opposed Apartheid, and every administration has voiced that opposition in one form or another. Certainly, when I was there during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, part of my duty and responsibility was to make clear United States objection to Apartheid and the principle of that kind of discrimination. We joined with the international community generally in imposing certain restrictions in relationships, and in refusing to ship military or police equipment to South Africa. Our opposition was reflected in the United Nations, at the International Court, and elsewhere," Rountree asserted in the Truman Library interview.

Rountree had favorable opinion of the way in which the United States instantly recognized the State of Israel in one of the more momentous foreign relations matters of the 20th Century.

"President Truman made some of the most courageous and correct decisions of any President dealing with international relations. I have nothing but admiration for his decisions on Greece and Turkey, which we've discussed here, and also on NATO, the Marshall Plan, Point IV, and Korea," said Rountree in reflecting on his career in the 1950s.

After retiring in 1973, Ambassador Rountree, who became a close and trusted  aide of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, retired to Florida.  He died on November 3, 1995 in a Gainesville hospital.

ORIE BOWER

The Lawyer Poet of the Rockies

Orie Bower had a way with words.  Whether in the courtroom or in the composition of poetry, this Wilkinson County native was known across the country in his latter years as the "The Lawyer Poet of the Rockies."

He grew up in the red clay, pine studded hills of the Georgia's Fall Line and lived his latter and most prolific poetry writing time in the magnificent blue hazed Rocky Mountains of the American west.   

Orie Bower penned poems about the grand and glorious armies of the South and the Lost Cause.  He composed poetry in his youth, but was quick to say that those early rhymes were all too  elementary.

Isaac Oren Bower, Orie for short, was born on May 26, 1850 in Irwinton, Georgia, the county seat of Wilkinson County.  His father, Judge James Cuthbert Bower, was an attorney and Judge of the Court of Ordinary, which then had jurisdiction over Probate matters, marriages and county business affairs. His mother, Martha E. Davis, was a daughter of Oren Davis. 

Although his father was opposed to secession,  Judge James Cuthbert Bower was an ardent supporter of the Confederacy after the war began.  Orie, only 14 years of age, would often go on recruiting missions with his father to urge local men who were becoming of military age to fight for the South to stem the rising blue tide of the Union Army as it was steam rolling across the state from the North to the sea.  That tide rushed through Irwinton just after Thanksgiving in the fall of 1864.  The war would later have a abiding impact on Orie, especially in his poetry. 

Orie attended school from the age of six until seventeen, when he graduated from Talmadge Institute in Irwinton.  The leading men of the community hired well educated Northern teachers to teach the more elite children of the community with the most modern educational methods.

But, Orie wanted no part of books and mathematical exercises.  He wanted to fish on sunny days and on cools nights, hunt opossums and racoons.

Living somewhat of a "Tom Sawyer" like childhood, Orie became enchanted with a young mulatto slave, "Wash."   "Wash" was a master teller of tales, ghosts stories and Negro folk legends, much in the style of Joel Chandler Harris's "Uncle Remus" stories.  

Orie desperately wanted to engage in the practice of law.  So, after a year to find himself in the paradise of Florida, he began the study of law in his father's Irwinton law office.  At the age of nineteen, Orie Bower was admitted to the bar in the Superior Court of Baldwin County.    Soon the life he had dreamed of, practicing law along side his father, was swept away by the economic tidal waves of Reconstruction and national financial crises which followed.   

Orie decided that he wanted to go to college in Lexington, Virginia at Washington College, where his hero,  General Robert E. Lee, was serving as president. Bower graduated from the illustrious institution, some six months prior to the death of General Lee, one of the most beloved and revered generals in American history. 

Said to have possessed uncanny abilities to perceive character and determine the behavior of human nature, Orie was often called upon to take on cases all around the country.  In his native home, Orie served as a Master of the local Masonic lodge, Justice of the Peace, a member of the school and Mayor of Irwinton, posts he held before the age of thirty.

  

When his health failed him, Bower reluctantly made the fateful decision to move to a healthier, drier climate.  So, it was off to a new life in Texas with his wife Olive, his four oldest children, his worldly possessions and his law books, in tow. 

From Celburne, Texas, where his 5th child, Bertie was born in 1878,  Orie's travels led him to Old Mexico, Arizona and California.  To help pay the bills of his family, Bower took a job in the newspaper business as a traveling correspondent of several daily newspapers of the West.  He even spent a year working with the Law Department of the Abstract and Title Insurance Company of Los Angeles, keeping track of the ever changing ownership of land in the burgeoning West.  All the while, Orie continued to practice law, from the Mexican Border to the silver mad metropolis of Denver.  

As he grew older and his pace slowed down, Orie's thoughts turned back to the rolling hills of home and of his old friend Wash, telling his tales by the dwindling early morning campfires.  He thought of the good fishing holes and hunting wild game.  He recalled the sounds of the mockingbird's song, mourning whip-poor-wills and constantly chirping katydids - all things that were once wonderful when he was young and carefree. 

Orie's poetical inspirations erupted.  Many in his family had written poetry.  Some say as many of six members of the Bower family had penned published verses.  

Although Orie had written many poems, most of which he thought unworthy of consideration in his youth, it was during his sickly, invalid years when Orie began to turn out one poem after another.  His major work, "T'was ‘64 in Dixie," was a compilation of poems about the War Between the States. It was so long, 8,000 words, that Orie broke it down into subtitles, like "Noble Yankee Dead," "Faded Flowers," "Southern Girls," "The Yankee Cat"  and "Who Wave's the Bloody Shirt?"

It didn't take long at all for Orie's epic poem to be noticed by newspaper editors around the West.  Rienzi M. Johnston, who was born across the Oconee River from Wilkinson, County in Washington County  a year before Orie was born, was the prominent editor of the Houston Daily Post.  Johnston, who would later serve a short term as a United States Senator, published the entire poem in eight issues.  It was Johnston who first penned the moniker of "The Dixie Poet" or "The Lawyer Poet of the Rockies" on Bower.

There is no available space in this column, let alone in this entire issue, to republish the poetry of Orie Bower. To read a compilation of the poetry of Orie Bower, go to: http://www.pdftitles.com/book/15458/dixie-poems.

Orie Bower, who died in Nov. 1901, in  Harrison, Arkansas, spent the last three decades of his life, traveling around the West, looking for a cure for the illnesses which plagued his body,  He never found a physical cure for his maladies.  What he did find was something much more mentally fulfilling and of much more lasting consequence.  He observed and experienced a wonderful introspective life peering at the wonders of nature and writing of  the glories and horrors of war.  From time to time, Orie even took time to speak out on issues which he saw as harmful, the  ways of corrupt politicians for one example.  He even took the time to write about the funny things in the world.

So Orie Bower, may you live forever in the blue hazed mountains of the Rockies and the clear creeks of the green Georgia forests. 

KINGS OF CROWNS

The game of checkers and its predecessors has been around for thousands of years.  The British called the popular game "draughts".  In America, we called it "checkers."  It was about 90 years ago when checkers skyrocketed to popularity in the latter years of World War I and the decade thereafter.  

The people of Dublin were right proud of their checker playing abilities.  In the summer of 1910, the greatest checker players in the South gathered in Macon.  Dublin City School Superintendent Roland Brooks was there too.  It was claimed that he was the best checker player in Laurens County.

When the game's popularity really began to soar in 1921, the checker afficionados of The Emerald City formed the Dublin Checker Club, said to be one of the first in the state, although  it was actually, only the first in the East Central Georgia area.  

L.G. McNeely was elected president.  The organization's first vice president was George W.  Shepherd.  H.M. Hatcher served as secretary.  Shepherd was hailed as one of the best checkers players in the state, finishing fifth at a past state convention. 

The real Kings of Crowns, in their own humble opinions, resided in the city of Irwinton, Georgia in Wilkinson County.  

Whenever a visitor or novice player came into town, he was pitted against Herschel Dominey.  If he managed to best the mediocre Dominey, the winner then faced, H.B. Adkins, who would pull out his pipe, "Old Betsy," to show the optimist who was really the best.   Then if he was a pretty fair checker man, Ol' Lum was called in to defend the honor of Wilkinson County.  And, if that failed, George H. Carswell, the reserve King of Crowns,  No one, ever beat Carswell.  And if such a travesty ever happened, there was always the threat of showing the purported champion a swift, and not so pleasant, way out of town.

The clock was just about to strike high noon on a hot August Saturday in 1924.  H.F. Heywood had just lost his 22nd game in a row to Herschel Dominey.  George H. Carswell, the local king of crowns, had just wagered four to one that Captain Skelton didn't get into heaven.  An intense argument arose over the issue of tariffs.  Among the assembly of the checker players and onlookers, politics was the main topic of discussion.   

Clang! Clang! rang the bell at the old Union Church.

Instantly everyone thought fire!

The memory of the cremation of the courthouse some six months earlier was still on everyone's mind.    Eyes turned to look for fire hoses.  Eyes looked toward the roof tops and tree lines for signs of smoke.  With not a single plume in sight, the crowd frantically began to collect buckets and fill them with water.  

Not knowing which end of town was on fire, one resident threw down a plug of Brown Mule tobacco which he was cutting for a customer, commandeered Tom Murphy's 1909 Ford, and dashed throughout the town looking for black smoke and flames.  The manic merchant nearly careened into the checker crowd which had assembled at Lum's corner drugstore.  Riding only on two wheels as it rounded the corner, Murphy nearly sideswiped Miss Pinkie Adams' rooster as he was in a wild path while on the way to see a flock of hens.  A pack of agitated hounds followed the swirling trail of dust.

And, the bell rang and rang and rang. 

Mrs. H.B. Adkins, in obedience to the Reverend's request, rang the bell at the appointed hour to remind townsfolk of the beginning of the revival on Sunday. 

Once the excitement was over, the games resumed, but not for long.

"All good things come to end," so they always say.  And so did the checker playing in Irwinton.  Or so, it was said.

Seems that the main topic of the Christian reawakening was the perniciousness of the grand old game.   Rev. Barron, the visiting minister, warned the congregation that checker playing was sinful.  The church members, composed of Methodists and Baptists, were somewhat divided on the issue.  A large number of the Methodists insisted that checker playing was not a sin, since it is not specifically mentioned in the Bible as being in derogation of God's word. The Methodists proclaimed it was only a sin for the Baptists to take part in the game.  Other Methodists remained insecure about the consequences of resuming the games, if indeed Rev. Barron was correct.

Doomsayers predicted the church imposed ban would ruin the city by turning away visitors and prospective citizens who had a passion for the game.  

It wasn't long before checker addicts reasoned and rationalized Rev. Barron's stern warnings.  When it was announced that the recent state championship was determined to be undetermined, those who had the ultimate confidence in their abilities began to wonder what would have happened had they taken a secret trip to Macon to compete and possibly win.  They had no doubt that someone in Wilkinson County would have come back with high honors.

After the ban on checkers was declared, Carswell, a devout Baptist, returned from a trip to Atlanta.  Checker fans held out all hope that since Carswell was not present in church when the matter was cussed and discussed, that the town tradition would resume and the Baptists would soon begin backsliding toward their normal behavior, saving the town from an abomination.  

Apparently, their wishes came true.   When plans for the new courthouse were announced and no steeple or clock was included, town residents went into another frenzy.  Some, like Lum Fleming who cussed the county commissioners for not promptly rebuilding the courthouse,  wanted a steeple like every other courthouse they ever saw.  While others insisted that a large clock be placed on the tower, to remind the checker players that it was time to go home for lunch and avoid the wrath of the beloved wives.

  Victor Davidson, an attorney and Wilkinson County historian, reported, "The checker board at Heywood's store has been consigned to utter destruction and the one at Thads', although still in existence, presented a forlorn and deserted appearance."  Davidson woefully stated that a 50-cent harmonica had taken the place of the checker board at Heywood's.  

When the church folk effectively  pinned the Kings of Crowns in a zugswang*, they resigned their games, removed their boards from the sidewalks  and took their draughts men to the back rooms where the games resumed out of plain sight of the ardent Baptists.

* Zugswang is where one player is put at a disadvantage because he has to make a move when he would prefer to pass and make no move. The fact that the player must make a move means that his position will be significantly weaker.