Frank Wallace and his wife, Velma, have lived in the same house on Tobacco for more than 30 years. Frank was born on a dairy farm on the eastern end of the orad in 1929 and has lived near Tobacco Road his entire life.MICHAEL HOLAHAN/STAFF

Tobacco Road image up in smoke

Caldwell would hardly recognize today's Tobacco Road

Web posted April 8, 1997

By Sylvia Cooper
Staff Writer

Erskine Caldwell would hardly know Tobacco Road nowadays.

Neither would Jeeter Lester or any of the other characters who people ``Tobacco Road,'' the book that scandalized Augusta - indeed the whole South - when it was published 65 years ago.

Broom sedge still grows on the eastern end, and there's still an undeveloped stretch of woods and a few little houses with junked cars rusting in the yards. But otherwise things have definitely changed.

The two-lane dirt road is now five lanes, and it's paved. Jetliners take off and land at Bush Field Airport where casks of tobacco once rolled toward the Savannah River to be shipped downriver to Savannah.

And commerce and industry thrive, especially toward the west end at Fort Gordon. The original Tobacco Road veers off and ends at U.S. Highway 1.

There are jiffy stores and shopping plazas, beauty shops, pawn shops, body shops, fast food, Chinese food, and the Neighborly Bar & Grill. There are car rentals and Jones Old Cars, a 4-year-old elementary school and at least five real-estate offices selling in the subdivisions that have mushroomed around Fort Gordon.

Amoco Polymers rises against the horizon like a giant space shuttle, east of the Forward Augusta Industrial Park.

Frank Wallace has witnessed the arrival of it all.

Mr. Wallace was born on a dairy farm near the eastern end of Tobacco Road in 1929. His father and grandfather were dairymen.

``The road went straight across what is now Bush Field,'' said Mr. Wallace, who now lives on 25 wooded acres a few miles down Tobacco Road from the old home-place.

``We rode it down to the swamp. Before you got to the railroad tracks, there were several old homes, tarpaper shacks on the right. They were tenant houses.''

Mail came and went by rail from Nixon's Station, where sturgeon and wild game from the river were shipped to other parts of the country.

``There was homes in various parts throughout the area. And everybody was poor. They didn't have anything. It was just rough goings at the time.''

In 1932, the Corps of Engineers started building the New Savannah Bluff Lock and Dam.

``In greater Augusta they said it opened in 1937,'' he said. ``That may be true, but it was finished in 1936.''

The road ran westward into Harlem, and there was nothing much along the way for almost 150 years.

``You might have a little old store on the corner somewhere,'' he said. ``There was nothing but a few shacks, a home or two in the Gracewood area, and then you had pasture land, you had farm land, and you had forestry. That's all. Nothing else.''

Tobacco Road was first laid out in 1789 to enable tobacco to be carried to New Savannah, a settlement above the Savannah River flood levels which had two months more of navigation than the city of Augusta, according to the historical marker at Tobacco and Highway 56.

``Tobacco was raised in all of the hill section of Georgia,'' said Mr. Wallace. ``We had a Tobacco Road here. We had several other Tobacco roads going to the river between here and Savannah.

``And every one of them were dirt roads. When tobacco was raised up there, it was packed in 800-pound casks that had a shaft through it. They hooked mules or oxen to it, and they came down rolling it to the bluff and onto flat ships to go to Savannah.

``Well, all of the boats from Savannah couldn't go to Augusta because of the rocks and everything. That's the reason the lock and dam was built, to raise the water level to give them a way to Augusta.

``They would come down with anywhere from eight to 12 mules or oxen, and the men driving them would walk alongside of them. The man walking alongside had this buggy whip, a plaited leather whip.

``They would be coming down the road, and you would hear him popping the whip. The crackers are coming. That's how you got to be known as a cracker if you lived in Georgia.''

During Mr. Wallace's youth, the road remained unpaved and full of potholes.

``You'd be riding down the road in an old farm truck heading west toward Gracewood, and you'd bounce around and turn around and head back toward Highway 56 in the opposite direction before you could stop the darn thing,'' he said.

``That's how holey and pot-holey it was. Nothing but a dirt, clay road and very seldom scraped.''

Nothing much changed until the late 1930s and early 1940s, during World War II, he said.

``Nothing was done until then,'' he said. ``They condemned Leroy Simkins' property to put in Bush Field. It was the best cotton land in the area.''

``And when I was in grammar school, I helped my dad move some of the houses out where Fort Gordon is now. The government took over all that property, run all those people out. Condemned that land.''

In the area taken over by Fort Gordon was the Pinetucky community. Augusta Mayor Larry Sconyers was the last baby born there, Mr. Sconyers said.

``I was born in one side of the house, and they were tearing down the other side,'' he said.

Mr. Sconyers said he saw the movie ``Tobacco Road,'' which critics said painted a distorted picture of the South as a region of ignorant poor white trash.

``It pictured that period of history in the '30s,'' Mr. Sconyers said. ``A lot of people are ashamed of our history, I guess. But that is what happened.''

Cliff McKie, 78, who has lived most of his life on the 83 acres his father bought on Old Waynesboro Road just off Tobacco Road in 1917, said most of the book was ``pure fiction,'' except for the poverty it portrayed.

``All of us people out here was poor, and we went barefooted all the time, except in the wintertime, and there was poor people all around back in them days, you know.''

Many people said Mr. Caldwell was writing about people in Jefferson County, and the author himself said the Tobacco Road of his novel was not the Tobacco Road in Richmond County.

Mr. Wallace said Mr. Caldwell wrote about what he saw growing up in Wrens and on his visits to Augusta.

``There was a heck of a lot of truth in his books, and he made a mint on it,'' he said. ``They didn't like him. They run him out of the state of Georgia.

``He went into Augusta, and the whores was hanging over the railings. He knew exactly what he was writing about, and they didn't like it one dern bit. He added a lots to it, but he had it right.''

Still others think ``Tobacco Road'' and Mr. Caldwell's later novel ``God's Little Acre'' were insults to the South.

In 1969, the city-county planning commission director even suggested renaming Tobacco Road might make it easier to attract industry. That caused a controversy and was eventually rejected by the full commission.

Extension Agent Clyde Lester said his father hated the book because he thought it demeaned the South greatly.

``And he hated Erskine Caldwell because he wrote that book,'' Mr. Lester said. ``And I'm a hillbilly. I'm from North Georgia. But that book has a worldwide reputation, thanks to Erskine Caldwell.''