While touring some historic homes in Athens, I was told, on
two separate occasions, that I should also visit the town of Madison, if I
liked historic places and architecture.
The first girl told me that that it is known as the city that was too
beautiful to burn, which led me to ask if Athens was burned. She didn’t know, but the second told me that
Athens had been outside of Sherman’s path to the sea. “In Athens, we destroyed our own history in
our efforts to modernize.” She said with
chagrin. However, she admitted there
does need to be a balance, and Athens had been doing a lot to preserve its
historic buildings since the late 1970’s.
I decided to take a day trip to Madison, and learned that
the motto ‘Too beautiful to burn,’ was not exactly true. Gen Sherman’s army did
burn the railroad depot and warehouses in the city, but they did leave the town
itself untouched. Also, although it is a
beautiful antebellum town, it was really saved by the people who new Sherman. Before the Civil war began, Joshua Hill was a
US senator who lived in Madison. Hill
knew Sherman and asked him not to burn the city. Sherman honored the request, and reportedly
ordered soldiers to guard all the homes in the city to ensure they were not
burned as the army passed through, tearing up the railroad and destroying
supplies the southern army might use. Hill’s
home is on the walking tour of town, and I thought it was one of the most
impressive ones in town.
Today, the town continues to preserve its past with almost
extreme measures. As I drove through
town, I noticed that the only national chain business around are kept on the
outer edge of town. I also was told that
someone had tried to open a Hardees restaurant, but the townsfolk protested. It was built anyway, and designed fit into
the antebellum style of the town. This
did not appease the people of Madison who refused to eat there. The place quickly went out of business and
reportedly the building remains empty. I
tried to find it, but only found a BP station the met the same fate.
Another thing I found odd was the city center was dominated
by brick buildings, but beyond the city center, brick was very rare. Apparently it was not as beautiful as the
rest of town, because the area surround the center square did burn, in 1869,
just as the city was beginning to recover from the civil war. It was rebuilt in brick, giving it a
different look from the rest of the city.
I started my tour at the Roger and Rose house, where I met
Betty. She was my guide and knew a
little about Madison, because she moved there as a young woman. She was looking for work and had an aunt that
was packing parachutes at an Air Force base, and she hoped she could get a
similar job. However, her mother was
afraid Betty might meet a man in the Air Force, and she would never see her
again. “Mom heard about a job for
AT&T in Madison, so she boxed me up and sent me here.”
Betty started out as a switchboard operator back then and
continued to work for AT&T for 30 years.
An impressive career, that came with a pension, but she wasn’t
done. She then moved on to being a bus
driver, driving 104 miles a day to “collect up my kids” from around the
county’s farms and return them again after school. She drove the bus for another 22 years, but
she still wasn’t ready to retire. She
told me “I have found that I like livin’.
And I’ve seen my friends retire and say, ‘I’m not gonna do nuttin’. But they ain’t with us no more. ‘If you don’t use it, you lose it,’ is what I
say.” So, she got a job with the Madison Historic Society as a tour guide,
where she has been for the last eight years.
I don’t know if you’re doing the math, but that is 60 years of
work. I didn’t ask her how old she was
but if she started work at 20 she’d be 80 and still guiding tours five days a
week. I asked if she was a volunteer,
and she said, “No, I get paid enough to put gas in the car, and buy myself an
outfit now and again.”
I was beginning to realize she was a bit of a historic
treasure, as she told me about the Rogers House, the oldest home in Madison. The first owner bought the lot $111 in 1809,
when the town was founded, and sold the house a year later for $1000. Not a bad return on his investment. Over the years the house had 17 owners until
it was bought by the city and restored to what it would have looked like in
1873. In one room they had stripped the
wall down to show some of the original wall paper. Betty told me, “They would have nailed the
wallpaper up in the fall and taken it down in the Spring. No insulation here, so the wallpaper kept in
the warmth, and the cracks between the boards let in cool air in the
summer.”
As a switchboard operator she said she learned a lot. “That movie The Help, that could have happened right here in Madison. Mmhmm.
You better believe it.” She told
me many of the homes in town have been in the same families for generations,
and the Stokes-McHenry House has been in the same family for seven generations! All these families had accumulated a lot of
wealth with plantations and pastures across Georgia. For example, Dr Eligah E Jones had a home on
Main Street and owned 114 slaves and over 3000 acres of land across the
state. He worked as a doctor with the Confederacy,
and his beautiful Greek Revival home is now the Heritage Hall, donated to the
city in 1977. When Betty came into town
the slaves were long since emancipated, but the town was still divided. There was a colored neighborhood, many of the
families still had servants and the ladies of the house gathered and gossiped
much like they did in The Help.
“When I arrived I was that girl that the women talked about
in church, but I had an Ace in the hole,” she told me. Her uncle was a member of one of the well to
do families, and when she sat with him at church one Sunday, and was introduced
as his niece, suddenly opinions changed. “I was that same girl they had been talkin’
about just last week.”
I asked if she still felt like an outsider in the town. “No, I feel like a Madisonian now.” She raised a family there, and now she even
has great-grandkids there. She said when
she first arrived she lived in a boarding house between the Baptist and
Presbyterian churches. “You can’t miss
it. Blue with white trim, right between
the churches on Mains Street.” My
walking tour of the town included her old home, known as The Magnolia
House. It turns out that during the
renovation, they discovered a trap door and tunnel, believed to have been used
as part of the Underground Railroad.
After we finished touring the Rogers House, she took me next
door to the Rose House, which was built by Adeline Rose in 1891. It is a small and simple home, but what is
most impressive about it is Adeline, who was born into slavery, but “was the
hardest workin’est woman” in town according to everyone Betty talked to. Betty
said she use to hear about Adeline all the time when she first moved to town
and set out to meet her. She never did,
but discovered, “She worked for one family, but did the laundry and babysat for
nearly everyone in the county.” She
lived in the house she built for 68 years, until her death in 1959. She had a boy and girl but outlived them
both, so in 1966 the city purchase the home and moved it to the present
location. As the brochure says, “It was felt that it was very important to save
this little house built out of the labor of love of a woman who was born into
slavery.”
As we toured Betty asked where I was from, and when I told
her Wyoming, she said, “Oh, never been out that far, but I hope to take a road
trip with my boy one day. He’s 53, but
he’s still my baby boy. Maybe even out
to Washington, and then we’ll loop back down and come back another way.”
I said, “Well you should take a little vacation, and get on
the road.”
“Ah, maybe next year… or the year after that.”
She then went on to tell me, “My husband use to drive long
haul. Every time he went on a trip our
boy would say, ‘Can we go momma, can we go.’
Well one time the brakes went out on the truck. We were stuck out on the side of the road
overnight, and trucks didn’t have air in those days, so we had the windows
down. Boy, those mosquitoes ate us up. After that, every time he had a trip, our boy
would say, ‘We can’t go momma. The bugs
will bite us.’ I guess the brakes going
out was a blessing in disguise.” She chuckled.
Well Betty, when you take that road trip, I hope you enjoy
Wyoming as much as I enjoyed talking to you.
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