DESTINATION: Georgia Museum of Agriculture brings visitors to the 1800s pioneering communities of the south

Steam billows from the engine of the Vulcan as it approaches the platform near the entrance to the Georgia Museum of Agriculture; brakes squeal…the train eases to a stop and dispels its passengers.

“All aboard,” calls Engineer Brandon Fitzgerald. Carrying its latest cargo of visitors, the Vulcan trundles down the track, towards the historic village and Montezuma Railroad Depot in Tifton, Georgia.

Site of 19th-century ‘living’ landmarks – homesteads and outbuildings in a rural, late-1800s farm community.

Crossing the rail-line onto unpaved roads, sightseers step back in time to southern Georgia 150 years ago.

The site showcases old-time professions that played a vital role in historical mill towns.

The drugstore - designed and decorated as it would have been over 100 years ago - is one of the favorite visitor-spots at the Georgia Museum of Agriculture.

Like small lumber yards for clearing large tracts of virgin yellow pine, backwoods distilleries that turned the sap of ‘scarred’ longleaf pines into turpentine and rosin, and the Wiregrass Forge where Greg Tucker maintains a perpetual fire, even in the wicked heat of summer.

“Being a blacksmith requires a great deal of physical labor. It takes its toll on you,” Tucker admits. Pre-COVID, the museum used to sell Tucker’s forged creations (such as roasting forks, steak turners, dinner bells, and Tucker’s overwhelmingly-popular metallic snakes) at the country store.

In the 1800s, Cooper’s Shed housed the skilled artisans who fabricated casks, barrels, buckets and troughs for the community.

In those days, unmarried turpentine still-workers lived in sparse quarters such as the Knight Cabin, consisting

of little more than a bed, hurricane lamps for lighting, and a chamber pot.

On Main Street, shops line the street. Included on Main Street is the company-owned Powell Commissary, which offered basic commodities to Powell employees, while other shop, Wiregrass Feed and Seed independent proprietors, specialized in grains.

Just as it did over 100 years ago, Wiregrass’ glass-fronted display boxes still flaunt rice, oats, beans and legumes.

At the museum’s pharmacy, antique prescription bottles line the shelves, and an old-timey ice-cream shoppe seats customers on vintage wire-and-wood parlor chairs.

The Vet’s Infirmary - honoring Dothan Animal Hospital founder Dr. Hansel Coy Poitevint – exhibits veterinary artifacts alongside a dispensary, animal barnyard and surgical arena.

The Lawyer’s Office highlights the career of Judge J. L. Sweat, a 40-year member of the Georgia Bar.

By far the most interesting feature of Main Street is the Georgia Recorder , a print shop from 1886 that still produces the museum’s daily program schedules.

Staffer Rebekah Rutledge demonstrates the fully-manual 1872 Washington Press: she hand-inks the plates (typeset with letters plugged-in backwards - a painstaking 2-3 hour process), feeds the paper into the machine, then dusts the fresh copy in a chalk-and-talcum-powder mixture to set the ink. She has to do this 250 times an hour - quite the late 19th-century fitness routine.

The 1890 Chandler and Price Job Press delivers an even greater “workout” as employees have to continually move 20-pound press plates.

Greg Tucker, blacksmith at the Georgia Museum of Agriculture’s Wiregrass Forge, creates metal-worked items for the museum’s gift shop and showcases the hard labor of pioneer blacksmithing.

Now fully electric, the press was originally pedal-powered; someone had to cycle constantly while another inked the plate and compressed the paper.

If you choose to visit - be sure to ask the print shop staff for your own copy of an 1882 West Texas “Wanted” poster that reads: “Notice! To all Thieves, Thugs, and Outlaws. Among Whom are: Saw Dust Sam, Billy the Kid, Big Jake the Mule Skinner, and about Twelve Others: If caught after 9:00p.m. in this City, you will be invited to a Neck-Tie Party, by about 200 Law Abiding Citizens.”

After leaving the print shop, museum visits are invited to follow Main Street to the Early 20th Century Complex, roam through the Masonic Lodge and the Barber Shop, then feel a little queasy at the scary-looking gynecological exam table and hanging anatomy skeleton in Dr. Vann’s Office.

But the stare of the museum’s show is the Tift House.

An upper-class home in a rustic, developing turn-of-the-century town, this slate-blue-and-green house was built by Tifton’s founding father, entrepreneur Henry Harding Tift, and his wife Bessie Willingham.

Considered innovative for its time, the Tift House had running water and an actual telephone. Even slowly-heating bread warmers, the 1900s’ rendition of a microwave, and a zinc-lined ice box, which held an enormous block of ice – the precursor to the modern-day refrigerator.

Museum staffer Chloe Holbrook often demonstrates cooking on the old-fangled wood-stove, where she bakes for school-group visits and events.

The museum also includes the Langdale Nature Center with hands-on displays of native South Georgia flora and fauna, Art Gallery, featuring a rotating selection of local artists, and the Ford B. Spinks Exhibit Hall which gives insight into long-ago modes of transportation and histories tied to cotton and tobacco, the state’s prime agricultural commodities.

From here, re-cross the tracks at the Montezuma Depot, and head towards the Traditional Farmstead Buildings of a subsistence agrarian community.

Relax on the museum’s lakefront bench swing to relish the cool breezes coming across the lake, or duck into the backcountry church – Wesley Chapel (circa 1882) – to see the preserved piano, pulpit and pews.

Glimpse 1895 Sand Hill Schoolhouse’s rows of student desks, individual writing slates, teacher’s blackboard, and a pot-belly stove.

After the bridge, happen upon 1870’s Clark Cabin, a reconstructed farmhouse flaunting a pickle barrel on the porch and enormous dinner bell outside the kitchen; if you’re lucky, staffer Chris Sommers will be instructing guests how to make cloth dolls.

With little money during those harsh pioneering times, and zero dollars for toys, mothers contrived these “baby-doll” toys from rags - maybe an old blouse – along with one of daddy’s handkerchiefs.

Sometimes, new moms would stuff the headpiece with sugar cubes to keep the baby quiet during prayers.

Enroute to the nearest railway terminus, guests can turn back to see the ever-too-familiar outhouse behind the bungalow.

Within minutes, Vulcan chugs around the bend, steam issuing from its smokestack; the air-pump pressures the brakes and the locomotive collects its passengers and continues to the exit of Georgia’s fabulous Ag museum - bringing visitors back to our modern century.

Georgia Museum of Agriculture 1392 Whiddon Mill Road, Tifton, Georgia (229) 391-5205 gma.abac.edu

Vickie Lillo - Gadsden County News Service

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DESTINATION: Georgia Museum of Agriculture brings visitors to the 1800s pioneering communities of the south

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Chattahoochee students get dressed up for “Drugs Are Scary” Day

Quincy purchases new dump truck

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