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.

Taken from the Greene County Development Company pamphlet, 1899
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.

An Easter gathering at "Flat Rock," c. 1890s ~

Circus elephants marching down Main Street in Greensboro ~

Siloam baseball team, c. early 1900s ~

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.”

Picture of the 1900 eclipse taken near Siloam ~

Teenagers gather around a Model-T Ford ~

A black resident serviceman ~

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.

Postcard depicting downtown Woodville at the turn of the century ~

Next Page


A History of Greene County, Georgia - Table of Contents

Early Years: Pre-History - 1800
Golden Days: 1800 - 1860
War, Reconstruction & the Coming of a New South: 1860 - 1885
The New South & the Turn of a Century: 1885 - 1915
War, Uncertainty & a New Deal: 1915 - 1940

Research Sources, Credits & Acknowledgements