Red Clay, White Water, and Blues

A History of Columbus, Georgia

Virginia Causey

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780820354996
• eBook ISBN: 9780820355030
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Columbus is the third-largest city in Georgia, and Red Clay, White Water, and Blues is its first comprehensive history. Virginia E. Causey documents the city's founding in 1828 and brings its story to the present, examining the economic, political, social, and cultural changes over the period. It is the first history of the city that analyzes the significant contributions of all its citizens, including African Americans, women, and the working class. Causey, who has lived and worked in Columbus for more than forty years, focuses on three defining characteristics of the city's history: the role that geography has played in its evolution, specifically its location on the Chattahoochee River along the Fall Line, making it an ideal place to establish water-powered textile mills; the fact that the control of city's affairs rested in the hands of a particular business elite; and the endemic presence of violence that left a "bloody trail" throughout local history.

Causey traces the life of Columbus: its founding and early boom years; the Civil War and its aftermath; conflicts as a modern city emerged in the first half of the twentieth century; racial tension and economic decline in the mid-to-late 1900s; and rebirth and revival of the city in the twenty-first century. Peppered throughout are compelling anecdotes about the city's most colorful characters, including Sol Smith and His Dramatic Company, music phenom Blind Tom Wiggins, suffragist Augusta Howard, industrialist and philanthropist G. Gunby Jordan, peanut purveyor Tom Huston, blueswoman Ma Rainey, novelist Carson McCullers, and insurance magnate John Amos.

CHAPTER 1

“Stepping to the Music of Jingling Dimes”

A Trading Town on the Chattahoochee

Cyprian Willcox, recently graduated from Yale, visited the young town of Columbus, Georgia, from October 1844 through July 1845. Though a Yankee to the core, he liked southern food, especially pork (“how infinitely cookable is he!”), sweet potatoes (“rich and mealy”), and cornbread (“a good pioneer” that “goes so scratchingly down the throat, . . . clears out the cobwebs, and makes the passage a nicely swept thoroughfare for what’s coming”). After being delighted by “the luscious softness” of the spring air, he suffered through summer’s oppressive heat. Willcox felt he was in “the centre seed of a red pepper, or the suburbs of Purgatory . . . fry[ing] in my own oils like dry pork over a slow fire.” He found relief in cold watermelon: “How restorative of our prostrate energies on a hot day like this to bathe the countenance in a cool watermelon . . . the crispy yielding pulp holding in solution the richest saccharine! how it breaks up the fountains of my mouth to talk of them.” On balance, however, Willcox viewed antebellum Columbus negatively. Though he foresaw a promising future, the city’s newness made it “decidedly rural,” with meager buildings “mainly one story, flat roof, unsubstantial, having scarcely form or comeliness.” Columbus society “lack[ed] individuality” and was too egalitarian for the elitist Yankee. Willcox wanted a “super-structure” to separate the upper class. “Silk and calico,” he declared, should not meet on equal terms. One reason the upper-class residents did not focus on their proper station, Willcox asserted, was their single-minded pursuit of wealth. He wrote in disgust, “The scent of the ‘Almighty dollar’ is unmistakable. . . . The Columbians never open their eyes but to describe the size of quarter-dollars; they step to the music of jingling dimes; and always wear faces proportionate to the length of their purses.”¹ Willcox’s observations were on the mark. Columbus in 1845 had not planed its raw frontier edges. The city’s business elite cared much more about profits than dress and manners.

The Georgia legislature established Muscogee County in December 1826, distributing most of the land by lottery. The next June it “set apart for public purpose” five square miles on the fall line. On Christmas Eve 1827, the General Assembly passed “an act to lay out a trading town . . . near the Coweta Falls, on the Chattahoochee river.” The act named the town Columbus. Why legislators chose this name was never made explicit, but Christopher Columbus was an early nineteenth-century icon representing the nation’s fearless expansion into new lands. A mere five years earlier, both Columbus, Mississippi, and Columbus, Indiana, received their names. The 1825 publication of the Navarette manuscripts, a contemporary’s account of Columbus’s life, caused a sensation and became the basis for Washington Irving’s popular A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828).²

Five appointed commissioners established the town: Dr. Edwin L. de Graffenreid, who had moved to the falls in 1825; James Hallam, probably a local Indian trader; and Col. Philip H. Alston, Col. Ignatius Few, and Brig. Gen. Elias Beall from central Georgia, all of whom had fought the Creeks in the War of 1812. On January 16, 1828, the commissioners appointed Edward Lloyd Thomas to survey and lay out the new community. A skilled surveyor who in 1826 marked Georgia’s boundary from Miller’s Bend near present-day West Point north to Tennessee, Thomas arrived at Coweta Falls on January 27. The site was not an unpopulated wilderness. The Creek town of Coweta, a few miles downriver, was a major political and economic center. The Wewoka settlement on the Georgia side had several hundred white settlers, a ferry, an inn, a few stores, and a post office. Thomas commenced work the next day, creating what would become Georgia’s last state-planned city. On February 15, he began laying out the town with his son, Truman, as a chain-bearer. The cold rainy winter weather took its toll. Several of Thomas’s crew became ill, including his son, who died on March 26 and was buried in the new graveyard, later named Linwood Cemetery. Thomas marked off 1,614 half-acre residential lots and set aside plots for schools, churches, and municipal offices. Large commons bordered Columbus on the south, east, and north, with the town owning the land along the river. Larger estates were available outside the town limits, current Fourth Street on the south, Tenth Avenue on the east, and Fifteenth Street on the north.³

The new town’s natural setting was beautiful. Virgin hardwood forests covered high banks overlooking the clear rushing river that dropped 125 feet over two and a half miles of rapids, providing, as an 1829 gazetteer gushed, “freshness to the air and pleasure to the sight, by jets d’eau.” Thomas’s plan called for a promenade along the river, “one of the handsomest and most romantic walks in the State.” The town site included huge trees and a large pond near present Thirteenth Street where hunters shot ducks and geese. The Creek Indians spread across the river’s shoals using dip nets to catch shad during the spring run. The southern end of town was mostly swamp. The commissioners advertised the July 10, 1828, land auction. Mirabeau Lamar, former secretary to Governor George Troup, set up a press on the northwest corner of future Broad and Eleventh Streets. He printed notices that were sent to newspapers across the South and published in the first issue of his local newspaper, the Enquirer. The commissioners praised “the rich and extensive back country [Columbus] has already at command and [the] increasing importance it will derive from the cession of lands on the West of the Chattahoochee River will ensure to it a degree of commercial prosperity not surpassed by any other town in Georgia.” The organizers’ priorities emerged in their emphasis on an Indian land cession not yet made, rather than the river’s potential for trade and industry. Andrew Jackson’s election as president that fall made the opening of those Creek lands fairly certain.⁴

Hundreds of buyers poured in for the auction. The Fanny, the first steamboat to reach Coweta Falls, arrived in January, followed in March by the Steubenville. The commissioners tried to maintain order, prohibiting any permanent buildings or fences and outlawing the cutting of lumber within the town. Six weeks before the auction, retired British naval officer Basil Hall marveled at the bustling nascent community: “Every thing indicated hurry. . . . As none of the city-lots were yet sold, of course no one was sure the spot upon which he had pitched his house would eventually become his own[, so] many of the houses were built on trucks—a sort of low, strong wheels, such as cannon are supported by—for the avowed purpose of being hauled away when the land should be sold. . . . Anvils were heard ringing away merrily at every corner; while saws, axes, and hammers, were seen flashing amongst the woods all round.” Hall heard that four thousand people were expected in the settlement by the time of the sale, “like birds of prey attracted by the scent of some glorious quarry.” The auction drew “men of a speculating disposition.” Most were middle- and upper-class planters, merchants, and entrepreneurs with capital to invest. Over nearly two weeks, 488 half-acre lots in town and all of the larger lots outside town sold for a total of $130,991. The most expensive lot, at the southwest corner of Broad and Crawford (now Tenth), went for $1,855, and construction immediately began there on the Columbus Hotel. Seaborn Jones, a prominent Milled-geville lawyer and politician, spent $4,256 on nine lots.⁵

Pleased with the auction’s outcome, the commissioners still wanted to restrain rampant development, recommending “preserv[ing] the large trees” along the river, “arresting the mists, and inhaling, as they are known to do, the mephitive exhalatory [foul-smelling vapors] arising from putrid waters.” The legislature incorporated the town in December 1828, and in the first election, white male voters chose Ulysses Lewis as the town superintendent, along with six commissioners. In keeping with the appointed commissioners’ earlier concerns, the elected officials’ first ordinance forbade “all persons to cut down or destroy any tree on the river Common.”⁶

Columbus grew quickly, and by December 1829, around one hundred buildings were under construction, most of them frame but two of them brick, and a regular mail stage operated to Montgomery, Alabama. Three months later, a visitor described a flourishing town with “a population of 1500 people, three churches, a post-office, several brick buildings, and above 130 frame buildings of wood, most of them painted.” The original town plan set land aside for churches. A Methodist congregation with fifty-four white members and seven black members organized in 1829 and built a log church on the southwest corner of what is now Second Avenue and Eleventh Street. After a revival boosted membership in 1831, the group, which later became St. Luke, built Georgia’s first brick Methodist church. Also in 1829, twelve whites and a slave, Joseph, organized a Baptist congregation, which built its first church next to the Methodists the following year. A Presbyterian congregation also formed and initially was located blocks from the town center. In 1831, the commissioners gave the group a new lot close to the other churches, and in 1845, the Presbyterians moved to a larger building at the southwest corner of present-day First Avenue and Eleventh Street. The parishioners of the Roman Catholic Church of St. Philip and St. James settled on their appointed lot on lower Second Avenue in 1831, remaining there until 1880, when they built the Church of the Holy Family uptown across First Avenue from the Baptists. The original plan for Columbus did not reserve a space for an Episcopalian congregation, but Trinity Episcopal Church was founded at the home of Dr. Edwin de Graffenreid in August 1834, and the congregation erected its first church three years later on the west side of what is now First Avenue near Twelfth Street. In 1891, Trinity Episcopal moved across First Avenue to a new Gothic Revival church.⁷

The churches and middle-class residents tried to provide a bulwark against the frontier town’s excesses, with mixed success. In 1829, de Graffenreid established a temperance society, much needed in an era when saloons lined Columbus’s streets and men commonly drank themselves comatose. A circulating subscription library opened on Broad Street in January 1832. A second newspaper, the Democrat, began publication in 1830. The Girls and Boys Academies, attended by middle-class children whose parents could afford the tuition, opened in 1832 on their lots reserved in the original town plan. The first itinerant acting troupe, Sol Smith and His Dramatic Company, arrived in Columbus on Sunday, May 20, 1832. The following day, Smith hired local contractor Asa Bates to build a theater on Broad Street, and Bates completed the structure by opening night on Thursday. It likely resembled the frontier theater described by Joseph Jefferson, who played Columbus’s Springer Opera House in 1880: “two log houses joined together with an opening between them which was floored and covered in. The seats were arranged outside in the open air—benches, chairs, and logs.”⁸

It was not unusual for a theater troupe to use locals as supporting actors, but Smith got more than he bargained for when he produced Pizarro in Peru. He hired twenty-four Creeks as extras for the play, paying each fifty cents and a glass of whiskey. He gave them the whiskey beforehand, “causing a great degree of exhilaration” among the Creeks. When the actors playing the high priest and his half dozen virgins appeared onstage, Smith remembered, the Creeks “raised such a yell as I am sure had never before been heard inside of a theatre.” Smith soon heard a mournful low humming, quickly rising in volume “from the stentorian lungs of the savages. . . . The Indians were preparing for battle by executing . . . the Creek war-song and dance!” The virgins fled, locking themselves in their dressing room. The Indians sang and danced for half an hour and “scalped” one actor by removing his wig. Smith danced along with them, hoping to move them offstage, but the Creeks showed no sign of stopping. Though the curtain fell, the Indians continued to dance until Smith paid them. The Creeks returned the next night and wanted to assist in the performance of Macbeth, but Smith adamantly declined their offer.⁹

Horse racing and attendant gambling were popular with both the elites and the masses. Beginning in 1834, a racetrack operated on the South Commons, featuring spring and winter seasons. Planter John Woolfolk also had a track and raised fine horses on his land south of town across Upatoi Creek. In 1857, three of the best horses in the country met on the South Commons for a four-heat match race run in a single day. Each race was four miles long, an unheard-of distance today. The lone mare won the endurance contest, covering the sixteen miles in about 31.5 minutes. One horse was in distress after the third heat and did not compete in the final heat, while the other horse died after the last race. Animal welfare was not a consideration in frontier sport. Dog- and cockfighting were also common, with one epic July 1834 cockfight lasting three days.¹⁰

The area along Front Avenue near present-day Tenth Street was called Battle Row because it was the site of frequent “trials of manhood”—violent disputes settled outside the law. Passing through in 1833, Swedish scholar C. D. Arfwedson was appalled at Columbus’s roughness. No civilized person could remain in the town, he declared, because “the manners of the people were uncouth. . . . Many individuals, there called gentlemen, would in other places receive a very different appellation.” Across the Chattahoochee, Indian Territory was not under the control of law: a “number of dissolute people had founded a village, for which their lawless pursuits and atrocious misdeeds had procured the name of Sodom. Scarcely a day passed without some human blood being shed in its vicinity; and, not satisfied with murdering each other, they cross the river clandestinely, and pursue their bloody vocation even in Columbus.” Irish comedian Tyrone Power visited the next year and described the inhabitants of Sodom as “ ‘minions o’ the moon,’ outlaws from the neighbouring States. Gamblers, and other desperate men, here find security from their numbers, and from the vicinity of a thinly inhabited Indian country, whose people hold them in terror, yet dare not refuse them a hiding-place.” These miscreants came into Columbus “in force, all armed to the teeth,” got drunk, and then fled back across the river, unmolested by outnumbered local marshals. Arfwedson noted that the resulting insecurity led all men to arm themselves: “Necessity makes it obligatory to obtain justice by personal efforts; and . . . as a consequence, the contest on both sides too often terminates in blood. The most trifling difference not unfrequently occasions murders of the blackest dye.”¹¹

Southern men embraced a code of honor emphasizing “justice by personal efforts.” Historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown notes that honor was external in nature, considered physically demonstrable. Others’ opinions were an indispensable part of individual identity and a measure of self-worth. Violence was an acceptable response to public insult. Working-class men settled slurs on their honor with eye-gouging fights along Battle Row, while the aristocrats fought ritualized duels. Nevertheless, locals were shocked on January 23, 1832, when a young lawyer, Joseph Camp, killed Sowell Woolfolk, a large landowner and state senator who had served as secretary to the original commissioners, in a duel near Fort Mitchell. The two ambitious men had aligned with opposing political factions, the Troupites and the Clarkites, parties bound by personal loyalty rather than ideological differences. The Niles Register remarked, “We do not know what they differ about—but they do violently differ.” When the conflict came to a head in Milledgeville, friends urged Camp and Woolfolk to settle their differences by dueling. According to the Augusta Chronicle, when the two men faced off on that frosty morning before a crowd that included many prominent community members, “Gen. Woolfolk shot first and his ball passed through the flesh of Maj. C., an inch above the navel. . . . After Maj. C. received the wound, he shot Gen. Woolfolk. His ball passed through W. above the heart. W. walked seven steps toward the crowd of spectators and said, ‘He has killed me.’ The blood gushed out of his mouth; he viewed it attentively, laid himself upon the ground and expired immediately, without having again spoken.” A few days later, the Enquirer de...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedications
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on the Text
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 “Stepping to the Music of Jingling Dimes”
• Chapter 2 The “Last Battle” and “Black Reconstruction”
• Chapter 3 “Plethoric, Laborious, Well-Fed, Jolly, and Complacent”
• Chapter 4 Lynching, Industrial Education, Babe Ruth, and Christian Communism
• Chapter 5 The Klan and Coca-Cola
• Chapter 6 Columbus in the 1930s and 1940s
• Chapter 7 Violence, Direct Action, Negotiation
• Chapter 8 From Optimism to Malaise
• Chapter 9 Renaissance
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index