Columbia County (Ga.)

Eight institutions (and nine projects) are recipients of the eighth set of service grants awarded in a program intended to broaden partner participation in the DLG. The DLG solicited proposals for historic digitization projects in a statewide call, and applicants submitted proposals for projects with a cost of up to $7,500.00. DLG staff will provide free digitization, metadata, and hosting services so that more of Georgia’s diverse history can be found online free. This subgranting program was presented the 2018 Award for Excellence in Archival Program Development by a State Institution by the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council (GHRAC).

Preference in the selection process was given to proposals from institutions that had not yet collaborated with the DLG. The Archives of the Society of Mary, Province of the USA, the 6th Cavalry Museum, the Georgia B. Williams Nursing Home, and the Midway Museum are all new partners for the DLG.

The selected collections document all corners of the state and life from the 1700s to the 1996 Olympics. There’s something for everyone: family researchers will find plantation, funeral home, county government, and nursing home records; art enthusiasts will learn of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s growth from its founding in 1945 to the mid-1980s; those interested in protest and politics can study community resistance to the 1996 Olympics, view the effects of segregation policies in urban planning, and encounter the changing face of Atlanta and Savannah’s public spaces in the 1950s. The materials document the state’s African American, Roman Catholic, and military communities.

The recipients and their projects include:

Georgia State University Special Collections and Archives (Music and Broadcasting Collections)

Digitization of 24 scrapbooks from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (ASO) Collection dating from 1945 to 1985 that include newspaper clippings of concert previews, reviews, and highlights of guest performers, composers, and conductors, as well as photographs, advertising materials, and organizational records such as memos and correspondence. The bulk of the ASO scrapbooks are from the 1950s-1960s and document the arrival of Music Director Robert Shaw in the late 1960s and the effects of the Civil Rights movement on the orchestra.

Georgia State University Special Collections and Archives (Women’s Collections)

Digitization of audiovisual items from the Carol Brown Papers, 1993-2012 (bulk 1993-1994) focusing on pro- and anti- LGBTQ+ activities in traditionally conservative Cobb County and the campaign to move 1996 Olympic events out of the County. Further, in a time of daily protest, the collection illustrates the power of creative, peaceful protest.

City of Savannah Municipal Archives

Digitization of the selections from Park and Tree Commission minutes from 1896 to 1920 that reflect the intersections of urban planning and civil rights, trends in landscape design, development of Savannah’s cemeteries (both African American and white, since Savannah had segregated cemeteries), and details such as the use of convict labor in city infrastructure projects. These records offer insider perspectives into the decision-making process related to these Jim Crow-era policies that are not often found in government records.

Greater Clarks Hill Regional Library System

Digitization of the Rees Funeral Home Funeral Records and the Lincoln County Courthouse Records. The Rees Funeral Home Funeral Records document funeral arrangements and obituaries for Lincoln County residents from 1940 until 1960. The Courthouse records consist of Lincoln County legal records dating back to the 1700s.

Archives of the Society of Mary, Province of the United States

Digitization of films and slides dating from 1938 to 1979 and drawn from Marist College educator Reverend Michael Kerwick’s films and from the papers of Marist educator Rev. Vincent Brennan. The materials document the Marist School community in Atlanta and, more broadly Roman Catholics in Georgia.

6th Cavalry Museum

Digitization of a collection of holiday menus created for the 6th Cavalry troops at Fort Oglethorpe from 1925 to 1940. The holiday dinner menus offer a glimpse of food and culinary traditions and of military life through troop rosters and highlights of each year’s troop activities.

Georgia B. Williams Nursing Home

Digitization of the Georgia B. Williams Nursing Home Archives documents the first maternity shelter where “only” African American women were allowed, by local Mitchell County doctors, to receive midwife delivery for their newborns. Materials in the collection include registers of the mothers and babies born between 1949 and 1971.

Midway Museum

Digitization of the Julia King Collection, composed of original land grants/deeds, plantation documents, indentures, estate documents, photos, and letters connected with the Roswell King family’s Liberty County plantation and the county itself from the late 1700s through the middle of the 20th century. The collection will be of particular interest to those doing family research on the enslaved in Liberty County.

Georgia Historical Society

Description of architectural drawings from the Savannah-based, woman landscape architect Clermont Lee. Lee is best known for her work designing gardens and parks for historical landmarks throughout Georgia. The drawings are from 1940 through the mid-1980s and include projects in and around Savannah, as well as several throughout Georgia and the larger Southeast.

More information about our partner institutions is available below:

About the Georgia State University Special Collections and Archives (Music and Broadcasting Collections)

The Georgia State University Archives Music and Radio Broadcasting Collections began as the Johnny Mercer Collection and grew to include related materials that include: other musicians’ and artists’ papers, early country, bluegrass and Southern gospel music, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra archives, and records of WSB Radio and other Georgia stations. The collection contains more than 20,000 pieces of published sheet music, Tune-Dex cards, and arrangements by American songwriters, as well as 50,000 recordings from a variety of genres. For more information, visit the Music and Radio Broadcasting Collections research guides at research.library.gsu.edu/musicradio

About the Georgia State University Special Collections and Archives (Women’s Collections)

The Women’s Collections chronicle women’s activism and advocacy in Georgia and the Southeast. Within this curatorial area are several notable collections: the Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women’s Movement Archives, the Lucy Hargrett Draper Collections on Women’s Rights, Advocacy and the Law, and the Archives for Research on Women. For more information, read the Women’s Collections research guides at research.library.gsu.edu/womenscollections

About the City of Savannah Municipal Archives

The City of Savannah Municipal Archives collects, manages, preserves, and makes accessible records documenting the City of Savannah’s history; administers the records management program and the City Records Center to increase the efficiency of City agencies; and shares the City’s history with City employees, citizens and visitors through outreach activities. The Municipal Archives services reference requests from researchers and the general public which relate to archival and historical City records under its administration in the City Records Center and shares the City’s history through a variety of public outreach activities, including tours of City Hall, permanent and rotating exhibits, and special programs. Visit www.savannahga.gov/475/Municipal-Archives

About the Greater Clarks Hill Regional Library System

The Greater Clarks Hill Regional Library System aims to provide quality library services and materials to children and adults in the community in order to meet their informational, recreational, and educational reading needs. Visit gchrl.org/

About the Archives of the Society of Mary, Province of the United States

The mission of the archives is to collect, preserve, and make available manuscripts, records, photographs, audiovisual materials, artifacts, books, and other items that document the ministries, houses, and personnel of the Society of Mary in the United States. Although Marists first arrived in Louisiana in 1863, items in the collection date from the early 1800s through 2020. The provincial archives for the U.S. Province have been housed in the rectory at Marist School in Atlanta, Georgia since 2000, when the former Washington and San Francisco provinces consolidated into the Atlanta province. The archival collection of the former Boston province was moved from Framingham to Atlanta in 2014.

About the 6th Cavalry Museum

The 6th Cavalry Museum preserves the rich military history of the Fighting Sixth Cavalry, stationed at The Post at Fort Oglethorpe from 1919-1942. The story of the 6th Cavalry began in 1861 as a U.S. Cavalry Regiment. Located on the Post’s original parade ground/polo field, the area is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, surrounded by officer’s homes and other Post buildings. The museum opened in 1981 through the volunteer efforts of the local WWII 6th Cavalrymen, their families, and interested residents. Visited by presidents, military heroes, and celebrities, the museum houses artifacts, uniforms, weapons, accoutrements, photos, and vehicles. Visit 6thcavalrymuseum.org/

About the Georgia B. Williams Nursing Home

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2011, the Georgia B. Williams Nursing Home in Camilla, Georgia was the only facility where African-American women could deliver babies in Mitchell County, for many years prior to the Civil Rights Movement. It was owned by Beatrice (“Miss Bea”) Borders (1892–1971), a midwife who delivered over 6,000 babies at the home between 1941-1971.

About the Midway Museum

Since its founding, the Midway Museum has been supported by the descendants of the Midway Church members who have provided 18th- and 19th-century family heirlooms, documents, books, genealogical lineages, heirloom furnishings, paintings, and artifacts. Many Midway Church descendants still live in Liberty County and coastal Georgia, serve on the Board of Governors, and visit during the Midway Church’s annual Homecoming. Visit themidwaymuseum.org/

About the Georgia Historical Society

Georgia Historical Society (GHS) is the premier independent statewide institution responsible for collecting, examining, and teaching Georgia history. GHS houses the oldest and most distinguished collection of materials related exclusively to Georgia history in the nation. Visit georgiahistory.com/

About the Digital Library of Georgia

Based at the University of Georgia Libraries, the Digital Library of Georgia is a GALILEO initiative that collaborates with Georgia’s libraries, archives, museums, and other institutions of education and culture to provide access to key information resources on Georgia history, culture, and life. This primary mission is accomplished through the ongoing development, maintenance, and preservation of digital collections and online digital library resources. DLG also serves as Georgia’s service hub for the Digital Public Library of America and as the home of the Georgia Newspaper Project, the state’s historic newspaper microfilming project. Visit the DLG at dlg.usg.edu.

This is the first in a series of guest posts contributed by our partners at HomePLACE, a project of the Georgia Public Library Service. HomePLACE works with Georgia’s public libraries and related institutions to digitize historical content for inclusion in the Digital Library of Georgia.

If you’ve spent any time in the Southern United States, you know kudzu by its moniker, “the vine that ate the South.” Indeed, a recently-published Southern Gothic story by J.D. Wilkes bears the same title. And yet the rise of the vine’s mythic powers in popular culture was foreshadowed by the United States Department of Agriculture’s concerted efforts to promote the plant as an antidote to soil erosion in the wake of Depression-Era dust storms.

Photograph of Horace Fitzgerald, Larry Edmond, John Devette, Clever Youngblood with a Future Farmers of America truck, Columbia County, Georgia, 1957 May

Encouraged for use as a roadside planting by the Soil Conservation Service, the predecessor to today’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, kudzu thrived in the full Southern sun, undeterred by automobile emissions and undisturbed by grazing wildlife. (Though, as the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center will remind you, the leaves are actually edible–like spinach!) It is in this context that the photos in the recently-released USDA Photo Collection, Columbia County, Georgia really come to life. Added to the Digital Library of Georgia in October 2017, the 70 Soil Conservation Service photographs document a variety of methods used by farmers, scientists and engineers to prevent soil erosion–including, of course, the planting of kudzu.

The collection, which was made possible through a partnership between the Digital Library of Georgia, HomePLACE and the Columbia County Library in Evans, Georgia, shows conservation practices in use during the 1950s-1970s. Mary Lin Maner, Director at Columbia County Library, notes that “Researchers who are interested in genealogy, agriculture, or the history of the region will be thrilled with the quality and scope of these resources.” The photos detail such practices as the creation of irrigation and drainage systems, windbreaks, rangeland reseeding, woodland harvesting, brush clearing, contour farming, and terrace construction. A few photos record Soil Conservation Service scientists surveying, sampling, and measuring soil conditions. There are also historic photos documenting conservation educational programs.

Photograph of J.C. Butler kneeling in J.H. Marshall's farm field, Evans, Georgia, 1952 April — Photograph of J.C. Butler kneeling in J.H. Marshall’s farm field, Evans, Georgia, 1952 April

And of course, kudzu.

“Much of Georgia’s history is deeply rooted in the environmental and economic impacts of agriculture and farming,” says HomePLACE Director Angela Stanley. “While these photographs resonate locally for Burke, Columbia, and McDuffie counties, they also tell a larger story about the country’s changing relationship to sustainable farming practices, land conservation, and environmental protection.”

Of course, by the mid-1950s the USDA no longer publicly recommended the planting of kudzu as a method for curbing soil erosion or feeding cattle, and by 1970 the plant was listed as a weed. In 1997 kudzu was listed on the Federal Noxious Weed List. And the rest, as they say, was history: left unattended, kudzu spread rapidly–though not as rapidly as some might believe.

“In news media and scientific accounts and on some government websites,” writes Bill Smith for Smithsonian Magazine, “kudzu is typically said to cover seven million to nine million acres across the United States. But scientists reassessing kudzu’s spread have found that it’s nothing like that. In the latest careful sampling, the U.S. Forest Service reports that kudzu occupies, to some degree, about 227,000 acres of forestland, an area about the size of a small county and about one-sixth the size of Atlanta. That’s about one-tenth of 1 percent of the South’s 200 million acres of forest. By way of comparison, the same report estimates that Asian privet had invaded some 3.2 million acres—14 times kudzu’s territory. Invasive roses had covered more than three times as much forestland as kudzu.”

Despite these much more conservative estimates, kudzu still figures prominently in the Southern imagination. As the photographs in this collection show, however, the Southern agricultural landscape features more than simply carpets of vine. Plantings of nutrient-dense crimson clover, as well as rescuegrass, alfalfa, tree farms, and educational partnerships all played a part in the USDA’s efforts to stabilize and enrich the soil.

Photograph of a farmer kneeling in a field of Sericea Lespedeza for hay and pasture, Columbia County, Georgia, 1950s

The images pertaining to Columbia County, Burke County, and McDuffie County, Georgia are part of a larger series of items that were taken throughout the continental United States and Puerto Rico and are housed at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Records of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, 1875-2002, and series title, Photographs of Water and Soil Conservation Practices, 1932 – 1977. The digital collection provides data transcribed from captions for the original photographs that includes information about the subject pictured, the location and the date the photograph was taken.

The South can tell as many stories as it can keep secrets. But the hope is that, with a little sunlight, this new collection will inform our understanding of the agriculture, landscape, and mythology the South has grown up around.

Tag: Columbia County (Ga.)

Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) awards eight Georgia cultural heritage institutions across the state Competitive Digitization service grants

Soil Conservation and the Vine that Ate the South