Week 7 – COMMUNITIES – For Work

Some communities were created for workers in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

“Quite a flourishing village” developed around the Dodge Meigs and Hilton Dodge Lumber Mills on Gascoigne Bluff in 1874. In addition to buildings for mill operations, St. Simons Mills had “a neat church, schoolhouse, post office and store.” The cutting capacity of the Big Mill and the Cypress Mill was about 125,000 feet per day. 150 hands were employed and about 300 lived at the village. When two Jewish brothers Levisons opened a general store in the community near “the negro homes” and “colored church” along Demere Road, the neighborhood was nicknamed “Jewtown.”

On the mainland in Brunswick Dixville was established in 1875 as a planned residential community for Brunswick’s working class — former slaves and white laborers – who worked at the nearby railroads, wharves and sawmills. By 1914 the neighborhood residents were mostly African American. “This community was historically insular and self-supporting in nature. Everything one needed was there, like the barbershop, laundromat, and grocery store…an icehouse, a theater and playgrounds.” Nearby was Albany Street nicknamed “Black Wall Street” with black owned businesses offering insurance, taxes, and the like. The population of Dixville swelled in the 1930s and 1940s when workers arrived for war time jobs building Liberty Ships, and maintaining the docks and shipyard.

In 1918 the Atlantic Refining Company built a large oil refining plant and a company village outside Brunswick with segregated housing for workers. A row of eight identical front gable frame, four square cottages was built for a “colored section (east side of US 341). A school was built in the 1920s to serve the company town and was a “central meeting place for the community that was thriving at the time,” recalled former student Ethel Quarterman. Another student Moses Myers said “race was rarely an issue because although the schools and communities may have been largely separate, the adults in the neighborhood who worked for the Atlantic Refining Co. worked with whites at the refinery and often had friendly relationships.”

More working class cottages and bungalows expanded the neighborhood. Close to ARCO was Selden Park, home to the Selden Normal and Industrial Institute “considered one the finest black educational facilities in the early twentieth century. “For a small tuition, students studied basic reading and writing, teaching, agriculture, dress-making, business, domestic science and carpentry.” After World War II, Selden became a public park and, during segregation, the park provided an important recreation and social center for the African American community. Entertainers, including James Brown, Sam Cooke, and Otis Redding performed during the 1950s and 1960s at the gymnasium and auditorium. Hundreds of children learned to swim in the park’s pool, and churches and schools held picnics there. Today the headmaster’s house and the decorative metal entrance sign recall the park’s heritage.