By Tharon A. Giddens
Staff Writer
Web-posted June 21, 1996 at 4 p.m.

A ugusta's most famous literary landmark is synonymous with the poverty and despair marking the dark side of Southern history.

Tobacco Road, five nondescript lanes of pavement connecting Fort Gordon's Gate 5 with Bush Field airport, was once a stretch of hard-packed sand linking Piedmont farmers with a small port on the Savannah River.

In 1932, the route gained notoriety with the publication of Erskine Caldwell's novel Tobacco Road, a dark-humored account of desperate, dirt-poor Jeeter Lester and his family.

Unable to find work and unwilling to leave the family's tumbledown sharecropper shack on Tobacco Road for the cotton mill, Jeeter is a brutal, ragged man reduced to depravity and degradation. Jeeter and his kin struck a chord in a country wracked by th e Depression.

The book became a best-seller and eventually a successful play and movie.

In the process, Tobacco Road entered everyday usage in the language as a reference to the poorest of the poor and as an image of the South of the period. Polite Southern society was aghast, and Mr. Caldwell was famous.

``I don't think he was trying to exploit stereotypes, he was trying to focus on the plight of the poor,'' said Hugh Ruppersburg, an English professor at the University of Georgia in Athens who has compiled anthologies on Georgia writers.

``He was focusing attention on less pleasant aspects of Southern life.''

"Tobacco Road" is the best-known work of a prolific author.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Mr. Caldwell was born in 1903 in the White Oak community in Coweta County, southwest of Atlanta. In 1919, the family moved to Wrens in east Georgia's Jefferson County, where he began his literary career writing for t he local newspaper and serving as a baseball correspondent for The Augusta Chronicle.

The future author explored the farming country around Wrens, where he learned of the poverty and despair of the Sand Hills sharecroppers and day laborers.

``I got a good look at these conditions firsthand after I took a job as a driver for a country doctor,'' he said in 1985. ``I saw people eating clay to fill their stomachs, and I entered tiny shacks with dirt floors that had as many as 15 people living inside.''

Such observations were the basis for much of his more than 60 works, including the best-sellers Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre in 1933.

Along with You Have Seen Their Faces, his 1937 collaboration on tenant farmers with his second wife, photographer Margaret Bourke-White, the works helped draw national attention to the plight of the rural poor during the Depression. His former neighbors were unimpressed.

In 1935, his national magazine article about mistreatment of tenant farmers in south Richmond County and Jefferson and Burke counties prompted an investigation by Theus Chronicle. In a series of articles beginning March 10, 1935, the newspaper conclude d that Mr. Caldwell's portrayal of squalor and despair was accurate but exaggerated: ``There exist families in utter need of rehabilitation, not typical of Jefferson County alone, but such as are to be found in all parts of the country.''

Guided on part of the tour by the author's father, the Rev. I.S. Caldwell of Wrens, reporters discovered the poorest of the poor. ``We were met by dull, stolid, stupid people, seemingly unaware of all their ills save hunger. Their clothes were rags in many cases. They seemed to possess no jot of pride of appearance. From babies to adults, nearly all were unkept and dirty.''

Augusta's Tobacco Road was just one of hundreds across the South, Mr. Caldwell said.

There were dozens of tobacco roads around Wrens and Augusta, but the road south of Augusta has long been associated with the novel.

``People come and look at it because they think it's the Tobacco Road,'' said Erick Montgomery, president of Historic Augusta.

What's left of Augusta's Tobacco Road is eight miles of sloping road on a sandy ridge that is a mix of commercial, industrial and residential usage. The Sher Cropper II Restaurant and a historical marker at the intersection with Old Savannah Road are t he only acknowledgements of its past.

The road follows part of a route blazed in 1789 to connect northern tobacco farms with the port of New Savannah, downriver from Augusta on the Savannah River. The route was selected to avoid stream crossings, easing the work of farmers laboring to roll barrels of the crop to the river for shipment to market.

In Mr. Caldwell's novel, the road was a 15-mile stretch across the sandhills, extending southeast to the Savannah River bluffs. As with its real-life counterparts, ``. . . always the crest of the ridge was followed, because when off it the hogsheads wo uld have rolled downhill into the creeks which ran parallel with the road to the river, and once wet, the leaf would have been ruined and worthless.''

Aside from the sand hills and the river, few landmarks remain in the modern landscape that played a prominent role in Mr. Caldwell's works.

``The old, decrepit farms so prominent in the 1920s and '30s are almost gone,'' Augusta historian Ed Cashin said.

In 1976, Mr. Caldwell said the tobacco roads had been paved long ago and that most of their denizens had traded rural hardships for urban squalor.

``They've paved it. Got a blacktop over it. Doesn't get muddy any more. But that doesn't change anything,'' he said.

As the sharecropper shanties disappeared with the passage of years, local attitudes about Mr. Caldwell changed, Dr. Cashin said.

``His stature began to grow when we became aware that he was recognized throughout the world,'' Dr. Cashin said. ``I think (someday) there will be a monument to him.''

Since his death from cancer at age 83 in 1987, Mr. Caldwell's literary reputation has undergone a reassessment as his works have reached a new audience.

Tobacco Road, God's Little Acre and You Have Seen Their Faces were recently reissued by the University of Georgia Press. Deep South, a nonfiction mix of interviews, anecdotes and observations on the South in the 1960s, will be released this month. Geor gia Boy, a collection of 14 interrelated stories, will be released in June.

Long overshadowed by fellow Southerner William Faulkner, Mr. Caldwell's works are gaining a new-found respect, Dr. Ruppersburg said.

``People are looking at Caldwell now not in light of the controversies but for what he achieved as a writer.''