THE TRAIN TO NOWHERE

The Story of the Savannah, Dublin and Western Shortline

It was going to be the railroad which connected Savannah to the rest of the world. There were already several railroads leading in and out of the port city which laid claim to that boast. Money poured in. Money poured out. And, when it's day was done, the greatest railroad which would never pass through Laurens County faded into a bad dream. It disappeared into the nighttime and never even made it more than one hundred fifty miles. It was gone, just another in a long line of highly hyped rail lines which never made the grade.

Many attempts were made and just as many failed to build another railroad from the port city of Savannah to Central Alabama and beyond. In the spring of 1882, capitalists from New York conceived the Savannah and Pacific Short Line Railway Company, a railroad from Savannah to Columbus, running through the Wiregrass area, crossing the Oconee River five miles above Mount Vernon, but missing Dublin by seventeen miles. When Dubliners found out that they were slightly off the main line, H.M. Burch and John S. Drew were appointed to lead a committee to convince the railroad's directors to bend the route just enough to bring it closer to Dublin.

With the abandonment of the Savannah and Pacific plan, as well as others, an application was made for the Savannah, Dublin, and Western Shortline Railway Co. in the fall of 1885 along the same basic route from Savannah through Dublin and thence to Americus through Hawkinsville.

By the beginning of December, Engineer Arthur Pou and his crew were camped at Fuller's Mill across the river from Dublin as they were making preliminary surveys of the route. On the Savannah end of the proposed route, engineers, delayed by bitterly cold weather, began their survey at the junction of the Charleston and Savannah Railroad and the Savannah, Florida and Western Railway, some crow fly miles from Savannah. The sight of railroad engineers surveying created much excitement along their path. Railroads meant money, and a lot of it.

A mere sixteen miles of railroad had been graded from Dublin toward Savannah by the Dog Days of August, 1886. Meanwhile the tracks of the Dublin and Wrightsville Railroad were finally completed to the eastern banks of the Oconee River opposite Dublin.

That's when the crews of Ferguson & Company, the railroad's main contractor, left their jobs. In near perfect unison with the massive earthquake which struck Charleston, South Carolina on August 31, 1886, the Savannah, Dublin and Western venture was officially deemed a failure. Ferguson sued the railroad. A receiver was appointed. Work ground to a disappointing halt.

Once again from the brink of disaster, the resilient railroad was revived. Col. John M. Stubbs, a Dublin attorney, led the negotiations to bring his dream of a major rail line running through his native Macon and his hometown of Dublin. A contract was signed to build the 157-mile line from Savannah in eight months and by the middle of 1887. With no doubt of the company's success, the directors planned to be able to ride a train driven by a Baldwin locomotive from Savannah to Birmingham by the end of 1887. And to prove their point, newspaper accounts indicated that the 307-mile route was going to be possible through the infusion of a million dollars by investors from England.

It was on the first of April 1, 1887, that the backers of the S.D. & W Railroad announced new and bigger plans for their rail line. The directors elected Douglas Green, of New York, and T.P. Branch, of Augusta, to begin the effort to extend the line from Savannah through Dublin and then to Macon, LaGrange and Birmingham with the ultimate goal of reaching the northwestern United States, drawing the eyes of prominent capitalists in Richmond, Virginia.

The newly proposed line would operate in direct competition with he long established, highly traveled, Central of Georgia railroad, which had been operating between Macon and Savannah for more than four decades. Initially, Central officials expressed no desire to invest in the venture.

But when it appeared there was money to be made, the officers and directors of the powerful Central of Georgia began the financial maneuvering to take over the operation of the Savannah, Dublin and Western.

Meanwhile, more prospective railroads through Laurens County were being planned. A petition for incorporation of the Augusta, Thomasville, and Gulf Railroad Company was filed to build a railroad from Augusta to Thomasville through Richmond, Burke, Jefferson, Emanuel, Johnson, Laurens, Dodge, Wilcox, Irwin and Berrien counties,

Then the law suits started. As the aspiring entrepreneurs fought over the rights to the line like a wake of buzzards plucking a deer carcass clean, any hopes of building the coast to coast railroad quickly faded away.

Despite the obstacles along the way, local backers, John M. Stubbs and Joshua Walker of Laurens County, joined with Daniel G. Hughes and Dudley Hughes of Twiggs County and set their sights on building a railroad from Macon to Dublin with an eventual extension on to Savannah.

In July 1891, the first leg of their dream was completed when the first train from Macon to Dublin rolled into the city of Dublin.

Ten years later in 1901, the dream of the Savannah, Dublin and Western Shortline was partially achieved. With the extension of the Macon, Dublin and Savannah railroad to Vidalia, passage to the port city from the Central City of Macon along a more southern route was finally accomplished.

But, it was a century and a quarter ago that west bound odyssey of the train they called the Savannah, Dublin and Western Shortline was gone forever when the day was done.

THE WADLEY AND MT. VERNON

A Significant Shortline Railroad

Although it was only around for a third of a century, the Wadley & Mt. Vernon was the most important thing to come to the extreme ends of Laurens and Johnson County in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th Century. Only some thirty-six miles in length, this shortline railroad brought about brief, but vital and long lasting, spurts to the towns and communities where its tracks ran. When it was gone, those towns were never the same again. Here is the story of the Wadley & Mt. Vernon Railroad and how it created the towns of Rockledge, Adrian and Kite. And, why its owners never quite saw their long range plans come true.


The Wadley and Mt. Vernon Railroad originated at the Old Town Plantation of Capt. Thomas Jefferson James in Jefferson County, Georgia. James, a master builder of railroads in East Central Georgia, drew a lot of his success in building railroads through the newly authorized use of buying convicts from prisons to do his labor. With a crew of up to three thousand bought and paid for hands, T.J. James took credit for building more than six hundred miles of railroad, a distance sufficient to run tracks from Dublin to Washington, D.C.








Captain James envisioned a railroad that would initially run from Wadley to Mt. Vernon. Wadley was a small commercial center in lower Jefferson County, but was strategically positioned on the great Central of Georgia Railroad. Mt. Vernon, the commercial center of the lower Oconee River Region, was scheduled to be on the Savannah, Americus and Montgomery Railroad. With each of its termini being on the vital major rail lines, James and his investors hoped to capitalize on the new markets this new road would open. In the beginning, James planned extensions northward to Augusta and southward through Valdosta onto the Gulf Coast.



James, a member of the large timber firm Donovan & Perkins, applied to the state to incorporate its logging road into a full-fledged railroad. Although the Wadley and Mt. Vernon had not then been incorporated, three passenger trains per week traveled between Wadley and Kite by March 1889. The state legislature finally approved. And, on June 25, 1889, the Wadley and Mt. Vernon was incorporated with a capital stock of $200,000.00. Within the year, a 13-mile extension was completed to Ricksville on the Old Savannah Road.



The Wadley and Mt. Vernon Railroad ran from Wadley south through Tom, Kite, Ethel, Meeks, and Odomville. The railroad crossed the Big Ohoopee at the Nazarene Campground just a few hundred feet west of the Highway 80 bridge. It ran southwesterly to a junction with the Brewton and Pineora Railroad in the center of Adrian. Capt. James, in moving his home to Adrian, made that once non existent community into a boom town and the headquarters of the railroad.



The railroad was completed through Ricksville, located at the intersection of the Old Savannah Road and current Georgia Highway 15 and just north of Blackville on Georgia Highway 86. The road turned in a more westerly direction through Orianna and onto the vicinity of Rockledge around the turn of the 20th century to become Laurens County's sixth railroad. By that time, James had the company's charter amended to extend the line to Valdosta, the most important rail center in Southwest Georgia. Capt. James extended the road to join with the newly constructed extension of the Macon, Dublin, and Savannah Railroad in 1902. Houses and businesses sprang up. Rockledge boomed. The new railroad gave the citizens of the area a closer route to the Central via Wadley. Engineers laid out an extension of the line to Mt. Vernon.



The company's directors changed their minds and instead of running the railroad down the eastern side of the Oconee River to Mount Vernon, the line was changed to continue in the same direction crossing lower western Laurens, Dodge and bridging the Ocmulgee in Telfair County before heading onto Valdosta. The ambitious 200-mile extension of the railroad hoped to capitalize on the vast forests of virgin timber, still left uncut in the upper Wiregrass regions of the state. In 1903, Congress granted the Wadley and Mt. Vernon's request to build a bridge over the Ocmulgee River. Once in place, plans were accelerated to complete the railroad. Work began on the railroad from Barrow's Bluff on the Ocmulgee to Douglas in 1902, but no work was ever completed beyond the grading to the Oconee River, southwest of Rockledge. Before 1907, the extension to the Oconee was completely abandoned. The cost of bridging both the Oconee and the Ocmulgee rivers was beyond the budget of the railroad, which mainly hauled freight and only a few passengers between small towns.

In the early spring of 1905, the Atlantic and Birmingham Railroad bought the assets of the Wadley & Mt. Vernon Railroad Company and renamed it the Wadley Southern Railroad. The new line also included a second shortline track from Wadley through Swainsboro and Stillmore to Collins, Georgia in Tattnall County. Railroad men speculated that Captain William Raoul of the A & B RR purchased the company to bolster his vast network of railroads in South Georgia. That news preempted a report two days earlier that the Douglas end of the Wadley & Mt. Vernon and two other local railroads had been purchased by J.E. Wadley, J.S. Bailey and G.G. Parker of Waycross. In 1906, the Central of Georgia Railroad purchased the Wadley Southern and moved its headquarters to Savannah.



The Wadley Southern was dealt a near fatal blow in 1915, when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled against it in a dispute with the State of Georgia. From the very beginning, the Wadley and Mt. Vernon was bound to fail. Good times wouldn't and couldn't last. The railroad lived and breathed with the timber industry. After twenty-five years, there were no more trees to cut. Naval stores in the Rockledge and Ricksville areas were then being transported to market or railroad depots by truck. When the towns began to wane, so did the number of persons riding the passenger cars through the dead towns of Odomville, Ricksville, Tom and Ethel.



The road from Adrian to Rockledge was closed first and by the mid twenties the tracks along the Adrian-Wadley end were taken up forever. The Wadley Southern officially went out of business in the early 1960s after closing its remaining lines.



In its day, the Wadley & Mt. Vernon and its successor, the Wadley Southern, were the lifeblood of the towns they served. When it folded, the towns did not die. They are all still there. And, on windless night, if you listen real closely, you just might hear the cry of the old freight engines and they chug through the woods.

RAILROAD PARK, DUBLIN, GEORGIA

DUBLIN CAR CLUB - CIRCA 1969 - L-R: Bill Tharpe, David Henderson, Lynn Tomlinson, Louie M. Curry, Jr., Bob Wilcox, Charles Fuller, John Read Deamer, Alan Palmer, Billy Jones, and Richie Chafin.

CLASSIC CARS

WEST JACKSON STREET

DUBLIN, GA.

LATE 1960s.

OCONEE RIVER BOAT - PLEASURE CRAFT

Postcard of a group on a houseboat on Oconee River, Laurens County, Georgia, 1936

Description Laurens County, 1936. Group of people enjoy a ride down the Oconee River aboard Doctor Ovid Cheek's houseboat, Wieuca.

From:  Laurens County Historical Society, Vanishing Georgia Collection.

1910 Buick, Cadwell, Georgia

Photograph of men in Buick, Cadwell, Laurens County, Georgia, ca. 1911


Description Cadwell, ca. 1911. Men pose for a photograph in a 1910 Buick. Front seat, left to right: Homer Mullis, Bob Lee. Back seat: Hiram Mullis, Johnny Fann.

  From: Laurens County Historical Society, Vanishing, Georgia Collection.