The Dodge County Courthouse at Eastman: the Grand Old Courthouses of Georgia
| Publication year | 2023 |
| Pages | 0036 |
| Citation | Vol. 28 No. 4 Pg. 0036 |
BY WILBER W. CALDWELL
The construction of architect E. C. Hosford's grand 1907 courthouse at Eastman marks the end of an era for Dodge County. The saga of the three and a half decades before this building was erected is a compelling tale of the transformation of a vast and virtually uninhabited wilderness of virgin pine into the lumber empire of two notable northern entrepreneurs, William E. Dodge and William Pitt Eastman, who in 1869, established The Georgia Land and Lumber Company. The company soon owned more than 400,000 acres of virgin forest including most of the land between the Oconee and the Ocmulgee Rivers extending southward from Laurens, Telfair, Pulaski and Montgomery counties to the confluence of these two streams where the Altamaha River begins.
In 1870, Dodge County was created, and the new village of Eastman soon gained a notable reputation as a winter resort for northern tourists. But by 1880, The Georgia Land and Lumber Company had "transformed a bucolic former resort into a noisy timber colony." As the fingers of tiny tram railroads spread throughout the region between the two great rivers, Dodge built two enormous lumber mills: one at Normandale, south of Eastman, and one on the Ocmulgee River at Wilcox Lake. Finished lumber was shipped down The Macon and Brunswick Railroad and logs were floated down the Ocmulgee and the Altamaha to Darien where they were nursed by steam tugs to The Dodge Lumber Company's great new mills on Saint Simon's Island.
Eastman and Dodge brought to Georgia enormous sums of that scarce commodity which New South promoters would later term "Northern capital." But as their story unfolded, it became clear that, despite their capital investments in the area's future, Eastman and Dodge were far from unilaterally welcome in the county which bore Dodge's name. William Eastman's great land purchase and William Dodge's magnificent entrepreneurial empire of timber and rail were the target of one of the largest and most persistent legal actions in Georgia's history. In a series of cases that lasted from 1877 to 1923, Dodge and his heirs were continually in court defending title to their domain against hundreds of claimants. This period was punctuated by evictions, injunctions, intimidation and even a brutal murder. All attempts to discredit Dodge's title failed. As the...
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