LAURENS COUNTY, A CENTURY AGO 

 

   As years go, the year 1923 was not one of the best.  The local economy was continuing to falter.  People were leaving Laurens County for better job opportunities in big cities and in the North.  The number of farms in the county had reached its all time peak of more than four thousand five hundred.   Despite the bleak news, the programs of agricultural and industrial diversification were paying off.  The Dublin Veneer mill doubled its output.  A new 80-ton ice plant, the Atlantic Ice & Coal Company beginning a new modern age in ice production.  

     A dozen years into its existence, there was a renewed interest in local Boy Scout troops.  Edward Jordan was the first scout in the 12th Congressional District to be awarded the prestigious Eagle Scout Award.  

     On the dark side, the Ku Klux Klan reared their evil heads in a 4th of July parade in Dublin.  Although the klan usually carried on their business outside of the public eyed, The Dublin Klan No. 108 paraded as many as two  hundred of its members in a large parade down Jackson Street.  

     Future Dublin attorney, Carl K. Nelson, Sr,, was elected the President of the Demosthenian Society at the University of Georgia.  the Demosthenian Literary Society at the University of Georgia. The society was founded in 1803 by the first graduating class of the university's Franklin College. It is one of the oldest literary societies in the English-speaking world. The society focuses on extemporaneous debate and promoting correct speaking.

 

   United Senator from Georgia, William  J. Harris, spoke on education to an overflow crowd of Dublin school students in the high school auditorium.   Senator Harris had made another speech three weeks earlier to a crowd of businessmen on the subject of national economic issued.  Fellow United States Senator, Walter F. George spoke to a large contingent of members of the Chamber of Commerce.   Governor Clifford Walker spoke to the Kiwanis Club, Dublin’s first fraternal  service club.  

     By the end of the year, Laurens County pig farmers proudly announced that they had produced 420,000 pounds of cured pork.  

     On the playing fields, the Dublin High Green Hurricane did not have enough players to field a football team, despite in the team’s first four years of existence, the Green Hurricane dominated the state in era where there were no classifications.   

 

   Doc Ozmer, a member of the 1929 Dublin Irishmen, pitched two innings in his first and last major league game on May 11, 1923.  Ozmer, pitching in relief for the losing Philadelphia Athletics,  set many league records that season for the Martinsburg Blue Sox, becoming that team’s first 20 game winner.

Josh Cody, a former All-American lineman from Vanderbilt, coached and played for Dublin’s semi-pro baseball team.  Cody also coached basketball at Mercer and the University of Florida.

     An important new business, Armour Company’s Dubin Creamery began operations on a massive scale.  For the first time in the city’s history, butter and dairy proucts were mass produced to a county which had a population of nearly forty thousand persons. The Jordan company opened a large plant in Dublin for the manufacture of bobbins for cotton mills.

 

   Col. Lewis Cleveland Pope, of Laurens County, was selected to command the 122nd Georgia National Guard Infantry Regiment.  Pope entered military service while a teenager during the Spanish American War.  Pope commanded Company A of the 121st Georgia Infantry in 1919 when it became the first Federally recognized National Guard unit in the United State.  Col. Pope died while he was serving in his third war, World War II.

     Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Webb, a former Dublin jeweler, served his country for more than two decades.  Webb enlisted in the local company of the Georgia National Guard in 1923.  Webb landed in France in September 1944.  Assigned to the 9th and 102nd divisions, Webb was assigned the duty of commanded a prison in Dachau, Germany with 20,000 German S.S. prisoners inside its wall.  In the five years before 1946, more than 30,000 Jews and other prisoners were murdered there. 

 

   Buggs McGowan, of Dublin, was a premier stunt pilot in the Southeast in the

 first decades of plane flight as the featured attraction of Mabel Cody’s Flying Circus.  Known as “The Wizard of the Air,” McGowan was killed in 1923 when his airplane accidentally crashed Bill McGowan, a kinsman, fought W.B.  “Young” Stribling of Macon in a boxing match.  Stribling rose the rank of the heavy weight boxing champion of the United States.

     The ladies of the John Laurens Chapter of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution planted hundreds of trees over the newly established Dixie Overland Highway, soon to be designated as U.S. Highway 80.  The trees were planted as a memorial to the men of Laurens County who lost their lives during World War II.

 

   The Dublin Lions Club was organized in 1923.  When it disbanded in the 21st Century, it was the second oldest Lions Club in Georgia. 

    Albert R. Arnau served as Executive Secretary to Gov. Clifford Walker.   Peter Twitty, Jr., also a secretary to Gov. Walker, and a former Dublin mayor, served as Game and Fish Commissioner from 1923 to 1934. Tom Linder served nearly two decades as Georgia's Commissioner of Agriculture.  

    Christmas Day marked the debut of the legendary Christmas Coke bottle across the country.  Bottles filled in Dublin bore the mark Dublin, Ga. on the bottom of the now rare and collectible bottle.