Over the course of 24 years of formal education – grades one through 12 and five degrees – I have had many teachers. A few were unprepared and incompetent in a rural world where educational opportunities for teachers were limited. Disruptions of World War II further complicated the situation to the point that qualifications boiled down to being alive, literate and knowing somebody who knew somebody. Still, a surprising number of my classmates from those early years excelled in college and in various professions.
No doubt, one reason behind such success is that each of us also had some great teachers. I can list mine and, at least partly, understand what each did for me. I also know that most of my fundamental lessons for living came from my parents through instruction and example.
Professor Richard Persico, my late, great colleague and friend, had an encyclopedic, insightful mind. We worked together in research, publication and service projects like the instructional core of the Turpentine Festival in Portal. He and Dr. Sue Moore were the architects of the anthropology major at Georgia Southern. For years, he and I were co-teachers for The Rural South course during which he became one of my most important teachers.
From him, I learned the influence of modes of transportation and communication on the economy and lifeways of people and how changes in these radically reshaped a region. In Georgia, initial settlement along the rivers and roads along their ridgelines, dominated until the railroad boom of the late 19th century created long lines of new towns with associated population shifts, commerce, education and politics. Next came the highway system with similar social redefinition. Railroad towns that were not also on major highways faded. The Interstate Highway System concentrated transportation and commerce along its routes. Towns distant from it tended to stagnate.
There are clear examples of all of these changes in the world in which I have lived. For part of the 18th and all of the 19th centuries, the Altamaha River system was the center of life in its region, as it had been for Native Americans before. Rafts of timber assembled along its banks and those of its tributaries were floated down it to Darien, cash crops from the back country to international markets. Before steamboats took goods and people up and down river, pole boats struggled upriver with essential goods.
Rafters followed the River Road back home and they encountered many other travelers, such as stagecoach passengers and merchants. Overland trails followed those used by Native Americans generally. After all, they were wise enough to choose routes that let them keep their feet dry.
However, white settlers relied on international sources for metal tools and some foods. It was necessary to develop and maintain roads to ports, particularly Savannah. This was a difficult journey using fords or ferries to cross multiple streams, but regularly settlers took cattle and wagons loaded with farm products east and returned with scarce essentials for living. Traveling merchants worked their way east to west. All were welcome for the goods they offered and the news they brought from a wider world. Some merchants, including enterprising Jews, pulled or pushed hand carts loaded with needles, thread, cloth other than homespun, pots and pans, etc. Over time, the road they traveled came to be called the “Hen Cart Road,” rather than hand cart.
Towns, wealth and political clout developed along river roads other than the Altamaha. Examples include the Savannah, Ogeechee and Oconee from the Altamaha upriver to shoals just above Dublin. Breaks in transportation at ferries and crossroads gave rise to communities, even towns. Think of Excelsior.
Railroads, massive in number and resultant change, came to south Georgia in the closing decades of the 19th century. There is not space here to deal with this, so it will be treated in a later column.
Roger G. Branch Sr. is professor emeritus of sociology at Georgia Southern University and is a retired pastor.