Railroads Tie Charlton County Communities Together

Soon after the turn of the century, in 1904, Charlton County began to blossom. Those were days before the roaring twenties. Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House, and the nation was enjoying prosperity. Charlton County came in for its share.

In 1904 in the south end of Charlton County, a mid-western newspaper publisher, P. H. Fitzgerald publisher of the American Tribune, an Indianapolis, Indiana newspaper, pushed his 1904 Colony Company there to migrants from the mid-west.

The settlement had formerly been named Cutler Station. Fitzgerald would name the community the City of St. George, a memorial to a young grandson, George, who died before his time.

Fitzgerald had begun a similar colonization project in Texas. The development in Texas failed, and stockholders were offered shares of the Saint George colonization to surrender their shares of the Texas development.

The Saint George project soon failed also, and fell into the hands of a court-appointed receiver. Funds received from the Receiver were used to build St. George's first schoolhouse. P. H. Fitzgerald almost went to jail for the developments. Instead, he pled guilty to mail fraud and ordered to pay a $1,600 dollar fine. Thus began the 20^th Century for Charlton County.

In Folkston in 1904, as the new century began, settlers were celebrating winning the County Seat of government from Traders Hill in a close election in 1901. Folkston had begun to prosper since the first trains passed through the town in 1881, as they traveled between Waycross and Jacksonville.

In 1904, Charlton County had a new courthouse, in Folkston, replacing the decaying log courthouse at Traders Hill.

The railroad was king. Folkston took its name from a Waycross, Georgia physician, Dr. William Brandon Folks whom acting as a land agent for the railroad, had acquired the rights of way for the rail lines to lay their tracks through the county. The railroad remained king in Folkston for nearly a half century. Employees of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Company got special treatment from area merchants. The railroad would see that their employee paid their bills.

The railroad depot building in Folkston was one of the busiest places in town in 1904. The town had a population of less than 200.  H. C. Page was the station agent. Daily, merchants would pick up supplies from the freight room. Passenger trains, stopped all through the day to pick up and discharge passengers.

However, it was in 1912, as Folkston became a town of 355 people that a telegraph tower was built in Folkston by the Railroad Company. Then the community began to keep more quickly in touch with the rest of the world. Radios did not come until the 1920s. Until then, Charlton county people read of world happenings in daily newspapers, usually the Savannah Morning News.

Scores of young Folkston men would gather on the grounds at the base of the telegraph tower to hear results of prizefights and World Series baseball games. The telegraph operator, reading the clicks from a sounder as the news wires transmitted the action, would relay the information to the crowd below. In 1912, Folkston youngsters heard Boston win over the New York Giants in the World Series from the lips of the tower operator.

During those times, the telegraph operator became the most important man in town. Western Union messages were sent and received by the railroad telegraph operator for people throughout the county. It was over those telegraph wires that the people of Folkston learned of political elections, and of the sinking of the Titanic.

Folkston owed lots to the railroads, and few complaints came about its operations in Folkston. Housewives didn't complain of the cinders scattered by steam locomotives as they roared through the city. The women would scurry to pick their white linens from their clotheslines and carry them into the house until the cinders ceased to fall.

Today, there stands beside the feed store of Billy Thrift, an ancient wooden building, complete with shutter-windows. J. E. Harvey, Sr., one of Folkston's earliest telegraph operators, said that building was operated as a store when he first came to Folkston in 1904.

There can be no doubt that without the railroads there would be few settlements in Charlton County, and throughout the nation. The towns sprang up along those rail lines as America adventured into more territory. Folkston and Saint George are certainly no exception.