We’ve found several Ghost Towns in Georgia in our area. These are former settlements and villages of one type or another that vanished from the landscape. The first one we visited was Mallory. It was basically right there in front of us, or maybe behind us.
This is the very definition of what we call “backroad travel” and we are practitioners of this art form.
We took off from the Firefly, pleasant Bed and Breakfast near Madison GA. Within just a few minutes, we landed amid some interesting relics from the past. I guess we shouldn’t have been surprised.
Background
We take frequent road trips around the area of Madison, historic little town about 50 miles east of downtown Atlanta. We often explore the little towns within a day’s drive of our B&B. There are a lot of day trip stories to share. Here’s a link, in fact. (Link)
All of this is because we want the guests, a lot of whom are European or Californian, to appreciate the history and culture of the area.
In this road trip we headed out randomly from downtown. Within 10 minutes we stumbled onto what amounts to a ghost town.
Lost Georgia in our Backyard: Mallory GA.
Do you ever slow down and stop at the roadside historical markers? There are plenty of them in the area. Come to find out, there was once a little town with 2000 residents in this place. The town of Mallory was abandoned at some point in the early 1900’s but the relics of it can still be visited.
The historical marker is in front of a little historical graveyard. The town had a general store, grist mill, several cotton gins, and a variety of residences. The main land owner in the area was the Mallory family.
A little farther down the road was the main settlement.
A Greek Revival Home (Not Revived)
This reference talks about the classic characteristics of the Greek Revival period of architecture (Link) This style was popular between 1820 and 1850, and we would have to say that this old place fits the style perfectly, right down to the Corinthian Capitals. This may be just as interesting to visit as this slightly more famous Greek Revival place that we checked out last fall (Link).
This particular place was not symmetrical, in the classic style, but did have on it the classic Southern Front Porch.
The Southern Kitchen
Did we talk about this? I believe that classically, in the southern US, the kitchen was added to the back of the house to isolate the main residence from the heat and noise of work.
There is a bit of an explanation of this in this link. (Link)
In this particular house, there is a two-sided fireplace in a room attached to the back of the house. At the moment, it is open to the air, but you can imagine a flurry of activity around this old place.
Most of these places had “Southern Kitchens” which were completely separate from the house, for the same reason. The space between, the “Kitchen Garden” was the home of chickens and other edible livestock.
Outbuildings
There are a few of these still around this old place. This particular one is about 300 yards away from the main house, and is of the type that you might think is a “slave house”. A very similar example is pictured in this article.(Link)
Nobody likes to think about this too much, but the simple fact of the matter is that is what the system was, and you should call it what it was.
Here is something else to think about. This split rail fence was built by hand and is about a quarter mile long. It consists of local wood, split and stacked by hand. The posts were driven into the ground by human energy.
This was probably long before the invention of hydraulics and chain saws. If you want, when you visit the Firefly, we can hand you a very similar piece of wood. You can then imagine what it took in terms of sheer human effort to build this rustic fence with these thousands of split rails.
We have toyed with the idea of having one like this. But, the sheer human effort in our case is not happening, even though for some of us, the salary is zero.
The General Store
We believe this is it. Someone has come by recently and put up a metal facade, for whatever reason. This little building has all of the characteristics. For one thing it sits on the intersection of two roads. For another thing, it has the classic porch area. All that is really missing is the cracker barrel and the rocking chairs.
In fact, this style is so archetypical that there is an entire chain of restaurants based on a similar design;
Here are some other examples not too far from us (Link).
This is a modern road now, but you can pretty easily envision this being the center of activity in this area: The big southern mansion, the adjacent store, and a little community of 2000 people being in the area using this as the center of life.
They evidently did not get their post office.
Lost Georgia in Our Backyard: A more modest setup.
Along the road a little further is this little farmhouse. It’s not grandiose, but it does have a collection of outbuildings, including a couple of dangerous abandoned wells.
The classic southern front porch has eroded from this place, but there is a southern kitchen attached to the back. It does have a lot of the characteristics of the big house on the corner, but as we said, it is more modest.
There is a tractor/pony shed, and further behind, a second little house with outhouse. You can draw what conclusions you want.
Should it worry anybody that the well, presumably used for water for drinking, is located directly next to the old outhouse? It evidently didn’t bother them. Or maybe it did.
Garbage
This is something else that nobody thinks about.
This is the only time in human history that there was something approaching garbage management. For the previous 150 years during which this area was settled, the preferred method of handling garbage was to throw it out into the backyard, and not worry about it.
So, in all of these places, including, by the way the Firefly, historic B&B near Madison GA, there is a garbage burial pile. If you want, I will show you where ours is.
But to make a long story short, there is a classic example at this place. The old bottles from these places make it to the antique places all the time. This proves, at the very least, the old phrase that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
It also suggests that if someone wanted to, they could dig these pits out carefully and learn a lot about the former inhabitants. We’d have to say based on this junk that this place was inhabited up into maybe the era of Doctor Pepper, which would be the 50’s.
Buzzards
I guess this is probably worthy of a blog post in and of itself, but this area is inhabited by a lot of these nasty birds. They fly around, take care of the road kill, and then migrate to Ohio.
The day we were here, there were a lot of them hovering over this old house. Is it an omen? Sometimes the animals in an area try to tell you something,
Old School
There is one here too. We speculated, in light of the outdoor toilet and relatively poor condition of the place, that this could have been one of the “colored” schools that we have found a few of.
There was no cornerstone in this old place to pinpoint the period in which it was built. Most of these were constructed by the WPA or other similar project during the first Great Depression. They were mercifully closed when the south was forced to integrate its school systems in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. (Link)
Judging from the condition of the place, and the overgrowth, that is the probable story of this place, but the walls can no longer talk to us. The generation that knew firsthand about these things are no longer proud of talking about it.
Here is an article, from a rather extreme point of view, about the practice of education of 40 percent of the local population prior to 1935 (Link)
What to make of Lost Georgia in our Backyard
We like for people to be curious about how people lived. In fact, in a way, we are in the business of exploration. Come to find out we are lucky that this stuff still exists, and in less than a 15 minute drive from the end of the driveway.
That is the first part of the story. If you like old timey things, this is perfect.
You can also imagine the time before paved roads, air conditioning, and running water that these places would have been tough to live in.
It is also easy to put yourself in the place of the land baron, and also put yourself in the place of the poor guys who had to stack that fence for free.
In a way, you want to preserve some of these old places. In another way, you want to let them be what they are, as a non-sugar-coated monument to reality. Enough has been said about this already.
We invite you to visit, and we will give you the little driving tour map of where these place are, for the time being.
I keep thinking the next big hurricane will knock them down, but there have been 150 years of hurricanes, and they are surviving.
Do you, as a real estate investor, want any part of this as a project? Maybe not so much. The current owner of this place, no doubt a descendant of the original people, will at some point sell the whole thing and it will become a subdivision.
Oddly the place is worth ten times as much financially cut up into little pieces, each of which would have a little house with fake pillars in front. Maybe not oddly.
Be there in the square.
PS: We had a conversation with one of our acquaintences who is from this area. They have the same same name as on one of the above tombstones, and they were not even aware of the place.
Maybe Lost Georgia in your Backyard is lost for a reason.
So you, the visitors to the Firefly, are now educated on some of the history, and can make of this what you want.
