Alan Mauldin
June 18, 2008 10:57 pm
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SALE CITY — The history of a small Southwest Georgia town like Sale City is fairly common, with tales detailing periods of boom as they became the site of timber industry and commerce brought by rairoads, followed by busts during the Great Depression that closed the banks.
What is not so ordinary is that someone put those stories into a book.
Retired school teacher Sarah Holland decided to write a book of her hometown’s history after she completed a history of Sale City Baptist Church that was started by Holland’s high school English teacher Joyce Gurley, who became ill and could not complete the project.
“While doing my research for that project I became interested in some of the old family names that I ran across and started asking my mother about them,” Holland said. “She told me what she knew, then I started talking to other, older Sale City residents. From there it grew into a book.”
The result was “Turpentine Stills, Sawmils, and Cotton: A History of Sale City, Georgia 1901-2006.”
The history starts when two brothers settled there in 1901 at the time President Theodore Roosevelt was in office, Allen Candler was governor and Mitchell County had been in existence for 44 years. Brothers A.T. Jones and Dr. H.H. Jones, who were living near Doerun, saw potential in the Sale City area and purchased a large tract from Manning Crosby, cutting timber and processing it in sawmills they erected to build identical houses on present day Jones Street.
In addition to the sawmills the brothers built turpentine stills, the book said.
“Sawmills and turpentine stills require many workers, so the Jones brothers put out the word and the workers came,” the book said. “The settlement grew and prospered. Homes sprang up. Land near the homes was cleared and prepared for growing fruit trees and vegetables to feed the families.”
As land was cleared the inhabitants planted corn, peanuts, cotton and tobacco, and by 1904 the population had grown to about 50, the book said.
In February of that year a group of businessmen, led by Thomas Sale of Albany, built a railroad spur through downtown Sale City, connnecting it to Doerun and Pelham and covering a total length of 26 miles. Stations for the Flint River & Northeastern Railroad, which brought passenger and freight service, were located in those cities as well as Akridge, Floride, Hinson -- which later became Hinsonton -- Maples, and Tuton Junction.
One of the mysteries Holland encountered in writing the book was whether Sale, for whom the settlement was named, ever lived there. In the book she recounts that no available documents or the memories of elderly residents can answer that question.
In fact, a number of documents related to Sale City were destroyed in a fire at the Mitchell County courthouse that occurred in the early 1900s, Holland said.
“The early history is what was destroyed,” she said. “I tried to find deed records. The clerk told me those are the ones that got destroyed. Most of the early history had to come from people. I went through the Camilla Enterprise archives. I spent many hours going through that paper.”
Holland described growing up in Sale City as “small town U.S.A, typical.
“Everybody knew everything about you. It was a very quiet life. We went to school and went to church, went to church and went to school; that’s about it.”
Like many small cities in the area, Sale City lost its local school to county system consolidation. A cotton gin burned and never was rebuilt.
The town’s bank closed during the Depression, a time when small farmers went under, a number of doctors left due to the lack of paying customers and the drug store closed when the pharmacist moved to Moultrie, Holland’s book said.
“The unincorporated area used to be real big because there were a lot of farm hands, but all those sharecroppers and everything moved away,” Holland said. “The same number of people live here (in the city) as did then, there are just fewer stores. The big stores in Camilla, Moultrie, Albany put small stores out of business. People went to (manufacturing) jobs because they got tired of living hand to mouth, crop to crop.”
The city’s population is now about the same as it was at the time of the 1910 census, which is included in Holland’s book, at about 300, she said.
Holland said she left out the town’s distasteful rumors, but the book does mention one episode that is part of the South’s legacy, the reported lynching of two black men in Sale City on Nov. 17, 1917. The book also notes that according to stories there could have been 20 to 30 similar victims.
“There are many such bizarre stories, but there is little to no proof as to whom the finger of blame can rightfully (be) pointed,” Holland wrote in the book. “Although the good folks of this fair city had their suspicions, they accepted the deeds as best they could and went about their daily routines as usual. If the victims of these tragedies had been white would the attitudes have been different?”
Holland said she has sold between 300-400 of the books out of 1,000 she had printed. She said she has had requests from former residents from Iowa, Tennessee and Texas, and even as far away as Japan.
“I didn’t go into it to be a money-making venture,” she said. “It was just something I wanted to do.”
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