Mr. Write's Page

My Fair City

In 2006, I moved to Jefferson, Georgia, a quiet little town 50 miles northeast of Atlanta. At the time, I knew very little about the place, except that my son Dustin and his family lived there. As it turned out, I like Jefferson just fine.

If you take the time to look, just about every community everywhere has an interesting history. My adopted town is no exception.

Jefferson is the county seat of Jackson County. Both the county and the town are over 200 years old. The county was founded in 1796 and originally covered 1,800 square miles — a major chunk of Northeast Georgia.

The University of Georgia was in Jackson County when UGA was founded in 1801. Georgia soon took away that distinction when Clarke County (Athens) was carved out of Jackson’s territory.

Over the years, six more counties were spun off at Jackson’s expense. Today, the county is down to an unremarkable 340 square miles.

Red = present Jackson County, blue = original Jackson County, green = Atlanta.

The City of Jefferson, founded in 1806, is named for — you guessed it — Thomas Jefferson.

Jackson County is named for James Jackson, a British-born Revolutionary War general who later was a Georgia governor, congressman, and senator.

By all accounts, Jackson was quite a firebrand. One biographer described him as “a turbulent personality, with no inhibitions about displaying his militant disposition on the dueling field or in legislative halls. He was a fiery little man, always furiously and fearlessly espousing some cause.”

Over the years, that combative, you-can’t-tell-me-what-to-do spirit lived on in many of the locals, often made manifest in criminal activities.

For example, well into the 1960s, Jackson County was home to a massive moonshining industry. It also was known as “the hub of the stolen automobile industry in rural Georgia.”

Such goings-on usually mean local law enforcement is, to some degree, in bed with the crooks. Sometimes they get away with it, sometimes they don’t. In 1963, after 23 years in office, the county sheriff was sent to prison for “accessory before the fact to auto larceny.”

A few years later, an infamous murder occurred here when moonshiners assassinated a crusading local prosecutor by wiring dynamite to the ignition of his car.

But all that, I am assured, is in the past. Today, Jefferson and Jackson County are said to be clean and respectable places.

All in all, that seems to be the case. These days, even the police blotter items and the political blunders are decidedly minor league.

If all cities and towns have an interesting history, they also have their own local heroes whose stories are worth knowing.

Where I live, three names immediately come to mind:

— Dr. Crawford W. Long, the Jefferson surgeon who, in 1842, figured out how to anesthetize his patients before operating on them.

— Army Major Damon J. “Rocky” Gause, who escaped from the Japanese during World War II and sailed a beat-up boat across 3,000 miles of open ocean to freedom in Australia.

— And Floyd G. Hoard, a local prosecutor whose 1967 murder at the hands of local moonshiners led to a long-overdue crackdown on area crime.

In my next three posts, I will tell their stories, all of which are most fascinating.

Revolutionary War General James Jackson (1757-1806) died in Washington, D.C. while a U.S. Senator. The “fiery little man” is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

July 4 festivities on the city square in downtown Jefferson, 1908.

Same view of the Jefferson square in 2012. As in many small Southern towns, a Confederate soldier stands vigil.