What Living Was Like In Times Gone By

One of the most pleasant things that has happened in my search for local history has come from the things various people have shared with me. For instance, Gene Shadburn has loaned me a copy of a family history called "Roots and Branches: The Ancestors and Descendants of the Taylor and Cantrell Families of Dawson County, Georgia." And Laurie Freeman sent me a copy of the book her mother wrote, "Fanning The Embers" ... a delightful set of memories in which Lois Lynch Hulsey recalls what it was like in Habersham and White Counties in the 1930's. Then the other day V. J. Strickland sent me some information about his boyhood and a photocopy of his Georgia School Patrol certificate that had the signature of the governor at the time, one Herman E. Talmadge,
You see, finding so-called "hard history" is not all that difficult. You know, things like when Hall County was formed, or Gainesville chartered. Or when the railroad came through the area. There are records about these things; minutes of meetings, newspaper stories, legal documents. What is difficult to learn is how people survived on the frontier; how they looked and how they lived. What they thought about, and how they felt.
One can get a clue about these things from family histories, and letters, even from old maps. For instance one of the stories in Gene Shadburn's book tells about William Henry Taylor at the end of the Civil War. He had fought in Gordon's Division, and was
at Appamatox when the war ended. He walked home, and it took him three months. The family didn't know if he was dead or alive till one day someone yelled from down at the creek to bring some soap and clothes. It was a tender time.
Mr. Strickland talked about standing on a main highway, old 53, and stopping traffic to let the school buses out from Sardis High. And another friend told me about schoolboy partrols from Candler Street Elementary School stopping traffic on Green Street to let students walk across.
You rarely find information like this in history books, but I happen to think it is just as much a part of our history as the hard history. And it is much harder to come by, so I thank you all for sharing it with me.
This is Gordon Sawyer, from a window on historic Green Street.

http://accesswdun.com/article/2002/3/196879