It’ll take years to publish all my pictures from the Deep South and fully exorcise the place from my memory. Damn it, I’ll make it happen, though.
Lately, I’ve been digging deep into the archives, and this is about as deep as it goes: All the photographs on this page were taken in and around Albany, Georgia, between 2005 and 2012.
It’s incredible to think that some of these images are over 20 years old—one was even shot on film and scanned.
My time in Albany wasn’t pleasant, but I learned to make the best of it, and through a lot of solitary wandering, I came to appreciate the area’s unique natural beauty.
Canopy of live oaks (Quercus virginiana) on Third Avenue, Albany, Georgia
Albany sits on a bed of limestone at the head of the Upper Floridan Aquifer, one of the world’s largest underground water systems.
Dougherty County and a portion of neighboring Lee County are notable for their karst topography, characterized by sinkholes of varying shapes and sizes that form when the sandy soil collapses into the cavernous limestone underneath.
Palmyra Springs, Lee County, Georgia
Similarly, “blue holes,” like Palmyra Springs in Lee County, form when the ground sinks into the aquifer, bringing its ancient, crystal-clear water to the earth’s surface.
The largest blue hole in the Albany area is Radium Springs, which still flowed year-round when I moved there and was one of the most breathtaking places I’ve ever visited.
Back then, the spring was closed to the public, and you had to crawl through a hole in a chain-link fence to see it, but the trespass was totally worth it.
Radium Springs, Albany, Georgia
The color of Radium Springs’ water was indescribable: deep blue and emerald green, dappled with every color of the rainbow when the afternoon sunlight hit it at just the right angle.
For decades, Radium Springs was a popular swimming spot—for Whites anyway—and in the 1920s, a large “casino” was built on its banks, though it never hosted gambling.
Postcard view of the Casino at Radium Springs, Albany, Georgia
The casino was submerged during the 500-year Flood of ’94, and again in a second flood in 1998. There was a lot of local nostalgia for the place, but no one had the money to renovate it, and the State of Georgia ultimately demolished the building in 2003.1
By the time Dougherty County turned the site into a public park, Radium Springs had begun drying up in the summer months, and on my last visit, it was basically a stagnant mudhole covered in algae.
Turns out the aquifer’s supply isn’t limitless, and as the region’s farms keep pumping out water to irrigate crops, the blue holes of Southwest Georgia will likely dry up and fade into memory.
Skywater Creek, Albany, Georgia
When Radium Springs is active, its water flows into Skywater Creek, which meanders through a grove of giant cypress trees to the nearby Flint River.
The Flint River is unique because it runs through a limestone channel. The water is brown as shit and crawling with reptiles, but when it’s low, you can walk across the rock shelf and find arrowheads and fossils in the holes.
Flint River, Albany, Georgia
One of my favorite spots to explore in East Albany was a giant bend in the river where the city’s settlers dredged the channel to make it navigable for cotton shipping—it didn’t really work.
I can’t imagine how they did it with 19th-century equipment, but somehow the workers cut the limestone in giant chunks and piled them up on the bank. There are large gaps between the chunks, so you have to leapfrog from one to the next, and God only knows what’s lurking in those cracks.
On one visit, I nearly stepped on a water moccasin that was at least three feet long—better than a gator, anyway.
Fossil Sand Dunes, Albany, Georgia
Another anomaly in East Albany is a swath of fossil sand dunes that were formed during the last Ice Age.
The prevailing theory is that when glaciers in the Appalachian Mountains melted, the water carried large quantities of sand downriver and deposited it around present-day Albany. As the waters subsided, high winds blew the sand into a ridge along the riverbank.2
The sand dunes originally stretched about 30 miles, from Albany south to Baker County. Many of the dunes have been destroyed, and some are covered in trees, so they just look like wooded hills.
The largest extant dunes are located along Sands Drive near the campus of Albany State University. Some of the peaks there are 30 to 40 feet high, although years of encroaching development, sand mining, and heavy four-wheeler activity had largely decimated them by the time I lived there. I’m sure it’s much worse now.
Skywater Creek meets the Flint River, Albany, Georgia
I was always a passing stranger in Southwest Georgia, and the longer I live, the more Albany feels like a weird blip in my memory.
I have no family, friends, or attachments there, and I’m glad it’s far behind me. I guess it has its charms, though.
After his earlier letter extolling Southwest Georgia’s advantages for Northern emigrants, W.H. Parkins (1836-1894), Atlanta’s first architect, wrote the following letter to The Albany News (Albany, Georgia) in May 1879.
In his second letter, Parkins repeated the central argument from his first—it’s no more convincing here.
“Where is the country… that can present a better field for intelligent immigration than this?” Parkins asked rhetorically. Clearly, Atlanta’s masturbatory boosterism had rubbed off on him.
Wallace Putnam Reed(1849-1903) later described Parkins as “a straightforward man,” and you can detect a matter-of-fact sensibility in his words despite the obligatory bullshit. Certainly, Parkins acknowledged the region’s shortcomings, albeit indirectly:
“They may say there is no society, no schools, no markets close at hand.”
That’s still a fairly accurate assessment of Southwest Georgia.
Parkins was neither a great architect nor a good debater, and his rebuttals in this letter were pitifully weak. On the suggestion of Southwest Georgia having “no society,” he retorted:
“I have always found that so far as society was concerned it regulated itself.”
The hell does that even mean?
Parkins made no attempt to defend the area’s substandard educational options, conceding:
“As to schools, there is a deficiency…”
His response to the region’s remoteness was similarly flaccid:
“My own plantation is twelve miles from the nearest Railroad station, still I do not consider that any particular disadvantage.”
Parkins also noted, rather vaguely, that “the New Jersey people are not altogether satisfied with their situation in Georgia.”
That apparently referred to a New Jersey farmer and 16 of his neighbors who bought 5,000 acres in Ware County, Georgia, in early 1879.1 Before moving south, the farmer told a reporter from The Atlanta Constitution:
“…the average opinion throughout New England is that the southern states are about the same as Mexico, in point of morals, society and lawlessness. It is believed that the people are barbarians, and the state of society utterly lawless and desperate.”2
Surely Ware County did nothing to change their opinion—the place is a shithole.
It’s also located in Southeast Georgia, not Southwest Georgia, but the two regions are equally awful: both are unsightly, sweltering cesspools of hatred, oppression, ineptitude, and arrogance.
Can you tell how much I detest South Georgia?
I also question Parkins’ description of “generous hearted… Southern planters,” and his assertion that:
“I have never had any trouble in finding friends any where in the South. It depends upon the man.”
Even today, the people of Southwest Georgia are deeply suspicious of outsiders, if not outright hostile.
Ironically, the region’s largest city, Albany, was largely shaped by three Northerners:
Nelson Tift (1810-1891), a Connecticut native who founded and developed the city.
Francis Flagg Putney (1837-1928), a New Hampshire native3 who founded Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital, now the region’s largest employer.
James H. Gray, Sr. (1916-1986), a Massachusetts native who edited and published The Albany Herald, founded the region’s first TV station, WALB, and served as the city’s longtime mayor. Gray’s local media empire has since grown into one of the largest media companies in the United States.
Of course, the rules are different when money is involved: if a rich Yankee arrives in Bumfuck, the locals roll out the red carpet and crowd around with their hands out.
But for a middling Atlanta architect like Parkins? Somehow, I doubt Southwest Georgia received him so graciously.
Credit him for optimism, though. In touting the region’s potential greatness, Parkins proclaimed:
“It will be, in my estimation, a great boom to this country, when men will awake from their lethargy and drowsiness, and see the drawbacks that attend them face to face, and then go to work to avert it.”
Spoken like a man who had yet to be worn down by the place.
Southwest Georgia.
Advantages—Advice From A Northern Settler To His Northern Friends.
Editors Albany News: In my letter to the Southern Enterprise (which you were kind enough to copy) I was anxious that the facts which Gen. Sherman said in regard to North Georgia might be extended, and that Southwest Georgia should reap her share of the benefits, for, in my opinion, she is justly entitled to honorable mention at least, and if the people who live on the fat of the land, on level rich lands, don’t speak out in her behalf Gen. Sherman’s red hills and deep gullies of North Georgia and Tennessee will soon be peopled with such an industrious class of farmers and mechanics that it will cause us to look with envy upon them, hence the necessity of blowing your horn, and blow it loud.
A few days ago I was traveling through the upper portion of Calhoun county, and I have no doubt Baker, Lee, Dougherty and others are in the same category, and as I saw the many hundreds of acres—yes, thousands, I fancied what a country this would be if those broad acres and 3,000 acre plantations were divided up into 200 acre farms and people with those intelligent, industrious, hard working farmers of the North, what a picture it would present. Where is the country (I was about to say on the globe) that can present a better field for intelligent immigration than this? What is there that cannot be raised, and where else the country that can grow something every month in the year? Now, I do not desire that any of my northern friends should be mislead [sic] as to the character of the soil, climate, people, or anything else, for what I say here I can prove, so far as the capacity of the soil is concerned. Can anything more be wanted or desired than to say that we can raise anything that grows out of the soil. Is it not better to live in a country where it is not nine months winter and three months late fall?
You may travel the world over and you cannot find a more generous hearted people than these Southern planters. They may say there is no society, no schools, no markets close at hand. So far as the first is concerned, that depends upon where one locates, and whether they come singly or by ten, twenty or fifty families. I have always found that so far as society was concerned it regulated itself. I have never had any trouble in finding friends any where in the South. It depends upon the man. As to schools, there is a deficiency, but the State is gradually working to the front in that respect; her State superintendent is indefatigable and is working hard to establish good free schools wherever there is a demand. As to the markets, they are in some respects, far away from some portions of the county. My own plantation is twelve miles from the nearest Railroad station, still I do not consider that any particular disadvantage. It must be borne in mind that people make the markets, settle up this country, and it will not be long before Railroads and produce buyers will be at your gates.
I notice an article in the Philadelphia Times where it says the New Jersey people are not altogether satisfied with their situation in Georgia. I do not know which particular portion of the State they allude to, but of one thing I am satisfied, that Northern people coming South cannot run things as they would North; their ideas and principles in agriculture and manufactures are good, most excellent, but they must adopt those ideas and principles to the situation when coming South. The climate is different, the people are different, things have to be managed differently to attain the same end; labor is not so well skilled, which I find is one of the great drawbacks.
But I am digressing. I am firm in the conviction that if Northern farmers will come here in Southwest Georgia, and come to stay, that after five years, eight out of ten will not go back North, and if the other two go back they will return in less than twelve months. I have known hundreds of Northern men to come South and stay, and I can count on my fingers all that ever returned, I mean on my acquaintance. It will be, in my estimation, a great boom to this country, when men will awake from their lethargy and drowsiness, and see the drawbacks that attend them face to face, and then go to work to avert it. Many farmers cannot get out of the old rut, and seek to run their farms and labor as they did during slavery; this cannot be done successfully. Labor has got to be treated differently and should be made interesting, which can be done in many ways.
I am confident that if the people of Southwest Georgia will divide up some of their large waste places, and, if necessary, give away every alternate farm of 100 acres, that the time is not far distant when they would be taken up and would enhance the value of their remaining acres double the cost. I know of a tract of land in one of the Northern States that was sold this way and the owner made an independent fortune. Those to whom the land was given got a clear title after five years, provided he put certain improvements on the land that was required of him in the start.
If these waste lands were in proper cultivation, and cotton be made a surplus crop, and some improved stock were introduced, it is my impression that the time is not far distant when Southwest Georgia would take a leap ahead, and lead the van so far as good lands, good society and good crops is concerned, and if my northern friends want to get into a country that has the easiest farming in the world let them come down here and be convinced.
Even the Constitution noted that “with respect to immigration, the remarks of General Sherman in regard to north Georgia may be applied to any part of the state, especially to southern and southwestern Georgia.”1
If you know anything about South Georgia, Sherman’s oversight isn’t surprising. Even now, the bottom half of Georgia is a sort of no-man’s land: primarily rural, sparsely populated, and largely ignored by those in Atlanta and the northern part of the state.
Today, the region is also deeply impoverished, but before the Civil War, Southwest Georgia was one of the richest sections of the United States—for a handful of White landowners, anyway.
By 1860, the Deep South produced two-thirds of the world’s cotton,2 and most of it grew in a swath of fertile country stretching from Southwest Georgia to lower Alabama and Mississippi, later called the Black Belt.
The fighting of the Civil War never even came close to Southwest Georgia, but in the early 1860s, most of the state’s 460,000+ slaves3 were bound there, and because the region’s plantations were so productive, the slaves far outnumbered the landowners.
Take, for example, Dougherty County, which includes the region’s largest city, Albany. In 1860, 150 landowners in the county owned 6,000 slaves, in what W.E.B. Du Bois later described as “perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew.”4
At the height of the Civil War, with the Confederate States Army struggling for food and supplies, the state legislature forced the plantations of a dozen Southwest Georgia counties, including Dougherty, to switch from cotton to food crops, and for two years the region became the army’s primary food supplier, lending it the title of the “Egypt of the Confederacy.”56
By the time Sherman wrote his letter to the Constitution, King Cotton’s reign in Southwest Georgia had collapsed as cotton production largely shifted to Texas in the 1870s.78 With slavery abolished, most of the old plantations were abandoned, although former slaves still tended the land as tenant farmers.
In 1878, W.H. Parkins (1836-1894), Atlanta’s first architect, purchased a plantation in Calhoun County, Georgia, just west of Albany. Given the area’s depleted condition, he must have paid dirt for the place.
Prompted by Sherman’s letter to the Constitution, Parkins wrote his own response in February 1879 to The Southern Enterprise of Greenville, South Carolina. Why Greenville? No clue.
Parkins’ letter was reprinted two months later in The Albany News, and is now reproduced here.
In the letter, Parkins lamented that Sherman had “left out the garden spot of Georgia entirely,” and extolled Southwest Georgia’s virtues for potential Northern transplants, namely: “delightful climate, rich loamy soils, plenty of streams, good society, plenty of land for all that want to come, and cheap.”
Contrast that with Du Bois’ harsher assessment of the region nearly 25 years later: “The whole land seems forlorn and forsaken.”
Of course, Parkins was White and had Atlanta money, so his perspective was bound to be a little rosier than the Black farmers Du Bois documented, who were still effectively shackled to the land by low cotton prices and high debt to absentee landlords.
I also wonder if Parkins had experienced a Southwest Georgia summer when he wrote this letter, given his boast that “We have winters without being froze up four or five months in the year—flowers in midwinter…”
He may have felt a little differently around June to September, when the place swelters like the portal to hell. Du Bois put it best:
“It gets pretty hot in Southern Georgia in July,—a sort of dull, determined heat that seems quite independent of the sun”9
What a Northern Settler Thinks of Southwest Georgia
Calhoun Co., Ga., Feb. 14, 1879.
Editors Southern Enterprise:
I have been reading over General Sherman’s letter published in the Atlanta Constitution, and it is plain to see that he speaks facts concerning the great drawback on immigration to Georgia and the South. What impresses me most, and what I take the greatest interest in, is the settling up of this portion of our State, also which to my mind is the best agricultural portion of Georgia. Now, Gen. Sherman’s letter will be read by thousands, and those who contemplate moving South will take his letter as an Index or guide as to the best portion of this State, Tennessee and Virginia; and as the General has been through the country three times, they think he ought to know. We feel that we have equally as good, if not the best, agricultural district in the State, and it should be made known far and wide. While Gen. Sherman does justice to the country he passed through, yet we consider he left out the garden spot of Georgia. He does not particularly mention this, so we desire to add our testimony, and cannot do it better than to herald it through such valuable and reliable papers as the Enterprise. We want your co-operation, for friend Jenkins knows whereof we speak.
Let it be known that here we can cultivate the land every month in the year, and get something to eat every day; delightful climate, rich loamy soils, plenty of streams, good society, plenty of land for all that want to come, and cheap.
I want to state for the benefit of my Northern friends (I am a New Yorker,) that if they knew, actually knew, what these lands would produce, with the same energy and push and intelligence they put into the lands North, they would be surprised at the results, and would soon be moving southward. We have winters without being froze up four or five months in the year—flowers in midwinter.—While I am writing hyacinths are in bloom.
This has been a great cotton growing section, but corn, wheat, oats, barley, &c., can be grown equally as well and with profit. I have traveled in North and Northeast, and Middle Georgia last year in search of a farm; finally, with prejudices on my mind, was induced to visit this section, and was not long in deciding what to do. I am delighted not only with the lands, but with the people, and the climate. If these lands were cleared of their stumps and old dead trees, they would look like the Western prairies. I can’t for my life see why so many people will go West and Northwest in those cold climates, when here is a stretch of country, that so far as climate is concerned, is unequaled in my estimation. And if manufactures be the object there is plenty of the very best water power.
This letter is already too long, as the General has in a manner advertised a belt of country from Lynchburg to Atlanta, let us keep the facts before the people who contemplate migrating South, that they can extend their trip beyond Atlanta and find better lands, and more equable climate further down. As I am interested in the building up and peopling of the agricultural portions of Southwest Georgia, I will take pleasure in giving the result of my observations to any of my Northern friends who will write me at Morgan, Calhoun county.
