Fitzgerald

By Cam M. Jordan and Sherri K. Butler

Founded in 1896 by pension attorney P. H. Fitzgerald as a colony for Union veterans escaping the drought-stricken Midwest, Fitzgerald has built on the spirit of unity exhibited by its early Union and Confederate founders. The town produced such notable citizens as Gen. Ray Davis, assistant commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps; U.N. ambassador Morris Abram; author Frances Mayes; Chief Justice Norman Fletcher; and folk artist Ulysses Davis. The inherent sense of citizen investment in the community led Fitzgerald to be dubbed "the Recruiting Colossus from Nowhere" by the Wall Street Journal after some 40 industries choose Fitzgerald as home. This is a story of pioneer vision and migration, of hewing a town from pine barrens, and of the reuniting of America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Sep 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781439622469

Cam M. Jordan

The Blue and Gray Museum chronicles the story of these entrepreneurial veterans and the town they established. Photographs from its collection and those of private citizens are paired with passages from the archives of the Herald-Leader, the museum, and the local library to give the pioneers a voice once more. Authors Cam M. Jordan and Sherri K. Butler are Blue and Gray board members. Jordan is the community development director for the city. Butler is a feature writer for the Herald-Leader.

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION

In the Indianapolis, Indiana, office of the American Tribune, a newspaper targeted to Union veterans of the Civil War, Philander H. Fitzgerald had an idea that would ultimately touch lives across the country and forever change an isolated part of the southern Georgia landscape. Fitzgerald envisioned a soldiers’ colony in the warm, hospitable South. The purchase of land would be funded by the sale of stock to the veterans who read his newspaper.

Whether the publisher and veterans’ pension attorney aimed to profit from those who bought into his plan or only hoped to benefit them is open to debate. But the scheme he advertised was seized upon by former soldiers and their families all across America, people who took his idea and made it their own.

In the early 1890s, a paralyzing depression had crept across the country. Simultaneously, drought ravaged the farmlands of the Midwest. A call went out for help. Georgia, the state that Sherman had systematically devastated in the war, was among the first to respond and responded generously, shipping trainloads of food and fodder north.

It might have been this act of benevolence or, more practically, the promise of assistance from Gov. William J. Northen that led Fitzgerald to choose Georgia for his colony. A delegation headed south to seek land for the American Tribune Soldiers Colony Company.

Veterans, weary of harsh winters and the drought that scorched their fields, gladly bought stock for allotments in town or for 5-, 10-, 20-, or 40-acre tracts of colony land.

Company officials had set their sights on the rural community of Swan and the thousands of acres of timberland surrounding it, most of it owned by the Drew Brothers company. The Drews operated a turpentine distillery in Swan. The community had the still, a commissary, a few houses, and little else.

Enough stock had been sold for the colony company to buy 50,000 acres of virgin pine forest, a figure soon doubled.

By the summer of 1895, before the land had been surveyed or preparations made to receive them, the first colonists began to arrive. They came by wagon, on horseback, by steamboat, and by train. One family even rafted down the Mississippi from the north, then came overland through Alabama. That summer, so many stamps were sold in the little post office in the Drew commissary that the postal service dispatched a special investigator to see what was going on.

Just how many people came in all is impossible to determine now. Writing in 1907, newspaperwoman Nettie C. Hall said there were 10,000 by actual count. Some 2,700 were Union veterans, survivors of every major battle of the Civil War, Sherman’s March to the Sea, and the Andersonville Prison. One had been in on the capture of Confederate president Jefferson Davis at Irwinville, just 9 miles away. Another had earned the Congressional Medal of Honor.

The Yankees were soon joined by veterans of the Confederacy, among them an Episcopal priest who, as a teenager, had joined Gen. Robert E. Lee in Charleston, South Carolina, and served with the Army of Northern Virginia until the end of the war.

As the surveyors struggled with recalcitrant Southern landowners to locate a center stake, allowing them to lay out the desired four-square city, the new arrivals set up housekeeping in shacks, tents, and covered wagons. Thus Fitzgerald earned its first name, Shacktown.

Determined to honor their wartime leaders, the colonists named seven streets in the soon-to-be-developed town for Union generals and, as a practical concession to the Southerners among them, named seven more for Rebel generals. (Ironically, the fire station would later be built along Sherman Street.) Planners set aside land in each of the four wards for schools

Seeking to give employment to the colonists and also provide upscale accommodations to well-heeled visitors, the colony company launched what is believed to be one of the first public works projects in America, the construction of a multistoried, wood-framed hotel. Grant-Lee was to be its name, but the long faces of the Southerners argued for the reversal to Lee-Grant.

Bit by bit, solid construction replaced the makeshift houses and businesses of Shacktown. Railways extended their lines to the new community.

When school opened in the fall of 1896, the students hailed from 38 states and two territories. Only one of the 12 teachers came from south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Uniquely in Georgia, the textbooks were free.

Though the town had made a promising start, challenges lay ahead. In 1901, the colony company went into receivership, due largely to expenditures in construction of the Lee-Grant Hotel. Founder Fitzgerald went on to other ventures, starting failed colonies at Geraldine, Texas, and Fitzgerald, Oklahoma. Only the original colony and St. George, both in Georgia, endured. For his activity at St. George, the Indiana speculator was charged with fraud.

Fitzgerald still occasionally visited the colony city and always received a royal welcome, but the town he had envisioned had quickly outgrown him.

By 1907, the city had completed recovered from the failure of its