Joel Hurt

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Joel Hurt (1850–1926) was an important businessman and developer of turn-of-the-century Atlanta.

Born in Hurtsboro, Alabama (a town named for his father, Joel Hurt, Sr. ), he went to college at Auburn University and graduated from the University of Georgia in 1871.

He was in the railroad business, surveying first out West the bed that became the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, next he surveyed a small spur off the Richmond and Danville line to Athens, Georgia.

He moved to Atlanta in 1875 and made a quick impact. He organized the Atlanta Building and Loan Association which he ran for thirty-two years and co-founded the Trust Company and starting in 1895 was its president for nine years. In 1882, he organized the East Atlanta Land Company where he designed and developed Inman Park connected to the city by his Atlanta and Edgewood Street Railway Company which opened along Edgewood Ave in 1886 as Atlanta's first electric streetcar line. In 1880, he filed what would be US patent 365258 for an interesting thermal water valve ^  then in 1887, he filed No. 374,188 for a new style of Valve Cock for faucets handling water under pressure. ^ 

To anchor the downtown end of his streetcar he built Atlanta's first skyscraper, the Equitable Building which in 1893 became the home of the two year old Trust Company.

His next land deal was to be Druid Hills for which he hired the Olmstead Brothers to design along a linear park around Ponce de Leon, but he sold the enterprise to Asa Candler for half a million dollars in 1908. He also built Atlanta's first fireproof theater, the Atlanta Theater (also on Edgewood) and his masterpiece, the Hurt Building (which still stands).

In 1940 land was donated to the city by the Trust Company and a park was dedicated as Hurt Park which lies across Peachtree Center Ave from the Hurt Building.

[edit] Use of forced prison labor

As documented in Douglas A. Blackmon's book, Slavery By Another Name, Joel Hurt exploited forced prison labor at a lumber camp he owned.

In 1895, Mr. Hurt bought a group of bankrupt forced-labor mines and furnaces on Lookout Mountain, near the Tennessee state line. Guards there had recently adopted for punishment of the workers the "water cure," in which water was poured into the nostrils and lungs of prisoners. (The technique, preferred because it allowed miners to "go to work right away" after punishment, became infamous in the 21st century as "waterboarding".)

During the Georgia Legislature's 1908 hearings into the state's system of leasing prisoners to private contractors, an elderly black man named Ephraim Gaither testified as to the fate of a 16-year-old boy at a lumber camp owned by Mr. Hurt and operated by his son George Hurt. The teenager was serving three months of hard labor for an unspecified misdemeanor.

"He was around the yard sorter playing and he started walking off," Mr. Gaither recounted. "There was a young fellow, one of the bosses, up in a pine tree and he had his gun and shot at the little negro and shot this side of his face off," Mr. Gaither said as he pointed to the left side of his face. The teenager ran into the woods and died. Days later, a dog appeared in the camp dragging the boy's arm in its mouth, Mr. Gaither said. The homicide was never investigated.

Called to testify before the commission, Mr. Hurt lounged in the witness chair, relaxed and unapologetic for any aspect of the sprawling businesses.

Another witness before the commission, former chief warden Jake Moore, testified that no prison guard could ever "do enough whipping for Mr. Hurt." "He wanted men whipped for singing and laughing," Mr. Moore told the panel.

In response to the revelations, Governor Hoke Smith called a special session of the state legislature, which authorized a public referendum on the fate of the system. In October 1908, Georgia's nearly all-white electorate voted by a 2-to-1 margin to abolish the system as of March 1909.

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Preceded by
Robert Lowry		 President of Trust Company of Georgia
1895 – 1904		 Succeeded by
Ernest Woodruff