HOMELAND'S PALMETTO HOTEL DATES BACK TO 1908

By Austin Hickox 

            In Detroit, Michigan, Henry Ford's Model T Fords were rolling off an assembly line for the first time in history, William Howard Taft was campaigning for President against William Jennings Bryan, but in the two-year-old town of Homeland, Georgia, it was a new hotel going up. The Palmetto Hotel on Homeland's Pennsylvania Avenue was the talk of the bustling town. 

            The imposing structure was to have 20 guestrooms, a restaurant, and a community room. Homeland's own businessmen, W. H. Thompson was building the stately hotel after having it designed by one of his neighbors in the 1906 Colony Company domain. The 1906 Colony Company three years later would be chartered as the City of Homeland.

            While builders were working long days to complete the new Palmetto Hotel, scores of other townsmen were felling pine trees with axes and crosscut saws, and hauling them off on oxcarts, Homeland's railroad depot stood only blocks away, and a building was being erected for making cigars, the Homeland Cigar Company. Indeed, Homeland was off and running. Six miles south, a new double-track bridge was opening across the St. Marys River, replacing a wooden one that had burned.

            But the Palmetto Hotel in Homeland was the centerpiece of the new town's progress. Registering at the new hotel after its opening, was the U. S. Revenue Collector, C. L. Vigal from Macon. His job was to inspect the new cigar manufacturing plant. Other locals met for meals and conversation in the Palmetto's colorful dining room couples courted around the dining room tables. Names that would become prime movers of the city in years to follow: M. G. White reportedly met Charlotte Cushing, who would later become Mrs. M. G. White, and raise three sons, John, Harold and George. One son, Air Force Captain John White would lose his life as the pilot of a transport plane over the Himalayan Mountains in World war Two.

            Homeland's Palmetto Hotel rapidly became the focus of a busy community, its residents working in tandem to move the city forward. Family names like Norwood, White, Armbruster, Waughtel, Willey, Crews, Lloyd, Guinn, Bruschke, and Thompson were counted on as community leaders, often shouldering a dual role as leaders in community churches.

            In Homeland, Tom Wrench shipped carloads of locally grown cabbage to northern markets by railcars. The town had its own weekly newspaper, The Homeland Enterprise; a locally owned bank was talked, but never materialized. The Homeland Telephone Company was formed and a brick two-story schoolhouse was built and opened for classes. C. W. Waughtel would be one of the professors in that school.

            Another educator, Professor Normal Zarfos, on his lands, planted 500 pecan trees, soon harvesting large crops of paper shell pecans to shipment from his Pecan Company in Homeland to northern markets.

Charlton County's government, with annual tax income then of only $73,000 dollars, soon realized the booming growth of Homeland with its mostly northern residents. The county in 1908 ordered road built leading from Folkston into Homeland. The two cities soon began working together to promote the entire area to the rest of the nation.

            In the 1930s, the changes in the economy began to affect Homeland and its landmark Palmetto Hotel. Thompson sold the Palmetto to C. W. Waughtel who turned it into a family home. After the death of Mr. and Mrs. Waughtel, the two daughters, Geraldine and Beulah Lee, lived there. Geraldine married Rudolph Norwood in 1941, moving into their own home, and Beulah Lee lived in the old hotel there until her death.

            For the past decade the once-bustling Palmetto Hotel stood idle. A sign of what used to be the centerpiece of a booming growing community.

            Now the City of Homeland has purchased the historic old hotel, bent on gradually restoring it to its one-time grandeur. Palm trees that once graced the hotel lawn still stand along Pennsylvania Avenue, and much of the original structure is still intact. Future plans include the Palmetto Hotel housing artifacts of a much-earlier Homeland, with reminders of its more active years of Pottery factories, railroad depots, cigar factories, stone churches, a telephone company and weekly newspaper.

            The Palmetto Hotel in Homeland will once more take center stage in a community that again fights for growth, recognition, and a better way of life for its people.