Friday 26 February 2010

Thursday 25th February 2010 - Glasgow-by-the-Sea

          After making myself a good breakfast, I instruct Dulcie to take me to Glasgow.  She only knows it by the GPS co-ordinates, so she drags me though a farmyard and up a dirt track.  When I get to the designated spot, there is a fine new summer house/hunting lodge by a lake, but nothing else.  And the road onwards looks like grass.  Since I don't have four-wheel drive, and no cellphone signal, I drag Dulcie back to the main road, ignoring her 'recalculating', and at the very next junction
[n1060]
(I know what you're thinking, I thought it myself: "No, don't go in there, that sign's a fake.  It's some deformed banjo player who wants to show you his organ.")  In I went.  It's another dirt road, with what can only be described as 'swamp' on either side.  The water seems to be at the same level as the road.  One more bucket of water and the road would be flooded.
          There is a church, and a cemetery.  But all the graves are less than 30 years old.  (There is one for a McMillan, born 1936, and given the first name "German".  Now what would be the purpose of that, do you suppose?)  I drive on gingerly and find one rather fine house.  The couple here belong to the family whose name appears on the next road, the one that led to the farmyard.  They're very welcoming, and about my age.  He tells me that it's a black church  He thinks there used to be a white church there as well, and a store, but he's remembering from 50 or 60 years ago.  There were lots of small farms, the sort "one man and a mule could manage, about 10 to 15 acres".  The hunting lodge and the farm I passed through are now a large plantation, the "Mayhaw Plantation", which bought up all the small farms and turned them into quail habitat, for hunting.  They have horses and don't want the road paved.  He thinks he might be the last man in Georgia to live on a dirt road.
          I go back round to the farmyard, which is the centre of the plantation, and find another local of my age, and he remembers much the same things.  He adds that there was a McMillan family, which sounds promising, but he says they were black.
 
           There is, apparently, a fine genealogical library at the county seat, Thomasville, which is only about 8 miles away.  But it's a lovely sunny day, and I'm only an hour from the coast.  Just in case the weather changes, I thought I'd take the rest of the day off and go to the seaside.  I look at the map, and find a place called Panacea.  Now who could resist that?  Perhaps, more appropriately, there is a place called Lanark beside it.
          And this is what it looked like
[n1071]
[n1072]
Eat your hearts out!

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