Talk:Saint George, Georgia
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THE BAKER COUNTY PRESS, Thursday, March 18, 1976 Page Two
The Way it Was - Gene Baraber
St. George And Other Communities
To speak of downtown St. George became a sad local joke within
the past several years, but, at one time, that little community's downtown was a serious reality. The crossroads between Jacksonville and south central Georgia and the old north-south Yelvington Trail attracted several settlers who milled, farmed, and operated mercantile outlets for the surrounding pioneers. Among these were the Gaineys, an old Nassau and Camden Counties family with Spanish background, and the area was early known as 'Gaineyville'. The first recorded name of the settlement was 'BattenviIle', in honor of Isam Batten.
The tramroad came through in 1898, and the station's postoffice,
Battenville, was established. The following year, post master John R. McNeil renamed the station for himself. When the Georgia Southern and Florida Railroad bought the Dyal-Upchurch tramroad in 1900, the stop was named Cutler for their general traffic agent John W. Cutler. For many years, the two voting districts of the area were Cutler (later St. George) and Gaineyville, the railroad being the dividing line.
In 1904, P.H. Fitzgerald, publisher of the American Tribune at
Indianapolis, Indiana, formed the '1902 Colony Company'. As in earlier pioneering projects, each stockholder was to receive a certain amount of land and would be required to make certain improvements. In December of 1904, Mr. Fitzgerald purchased 9,000 acres from the Georgia, Southern and Florida RR. By 1906, Mr. Fitzgerald had purchased much of present St. George, and Cutler was no more. He named the little community in 1905 in honor of his deceased son George.
With its transplanted population, St. George grew into a little
city of more than a thousand residents. Its, downtown maintained 54 businesses and several masonry buildings (Macclenny, at the time, could only boast of one such structure). The Bank of St. George, owned by John F. Blake, operated from 1910 to 1916. The Gazette began publication in 1905, and was replaced by the Outlook in 1911. The Outlook folded in 1913. John Harris; the Gazette's publisher is still active at 100 years plus in Folkston.
Mr. Fitzgerald, the founder, became involved in a federal lawsuit
regarding irregular business practices and his colonization company went under. The court ordered the sale of remaining colony land, and the funds received built a brick school building. Unlike some of her neighbors, Charlton County has maintained the handsome structure and used it for seventy years, proving it unnecessary to erect a new school house every Generation.
As the Bend's timber and valuable farmland played out and the
local citizens began to feel crowded by the newcomers, a great population shift took place. Several families of long standing sold out to the Fitzgerald company for 5 and 10 cents an acre and moved to Nassau, Duval, Baker and Columbia Counties, Florida. The new bustling nurseries industry attracted many to the Macclenny-Glen Saint Mary area.
One example of those migrants was Mrs. Sarah Thompson Hodges,
widow of John Hodges. She sold hundreds of acres and transferred her large family to south of Macclenny. Mrs. Hodges was later immortalized as the midwife in Harwick's 'Possom Trot'. Following suit were the families Crews, Lauramore, Harris, Johns, Johnson, Burnsed and others.
Farming alone could not sustain St. George and when many attempts
to bolster the economy failed, most of the colonists returned north. A few hardy souls remained, including a group of Union veterans. The old gentlemen from the Grand Army of the Republic finished their lives peacefully among their former enemy and now rest in a special plot within the St. George Cemetery.
Further north on the Yelvington Trail lies the now defunct mill
camp of Toledo. It was the namesake of Toledo, Ohio, home of the brothers J W. and R.B. Brooks who set up their mill in Charlton County in 1887. Two doctors served the sprawling encampment of several hundred souls. A money order post office was established in 1895, and tram road was laid to Traders Hill.
Financial trouble killed Toledo in 1898. However, the post office
was revived in 1899. In 1905, it died again, but was re-established in 1909 and survived until 1930. In an earlier article (the Canaday Fort), it was erroneously stated that Toledo was once called Moonshine'. That community was not within the limits of the Bend, however.
To the northwest of St. George, near the Okefenokee, is the
Boones Creek Cemetery, and Church. Once the nucleus of an extensive community of Crews, Stokes, and Roberts families, there remains no more than a beautifully kept burial grounds and a little meeting house of the old Cracker Primitive Baptist architecture.
In 1881, an infant, and first child, of Mr. and Mrs. Enoch Jeff
Roberts died and Mrs. Roberts traded a cow and calf for three acres of land on which to bury his baby. This plot, called the 'Roberts Cemetery' for years, gradually assumed the name of nearby Boones Creek.
