The Echols County Courthouse at Statenville: the Grand Old Courthouses of Georgia

• Publication year: 2023
• Pages: 0028
• Citation: Vol. 28 No. 5 Pg. 0028

The Echols County Courthouse at Statenville: The Grand Old Courthouses of Georgia Vol. 28 No. 5 Pg. 28 Georgia Bar Journal April, 2023

BY WILBER W. CALDWELL

PHOTO COURTESY OF TED BROOKE

Completed in 1899, this sturdy frame courthouse sounded a late vernacular echo of the Greek Revival in Echols County. This building is typical of the many "Carpenter Greek" courthouses that rose in remote areas of the piney woods before the turn of the 20th century. In the same year that this courthouse was built in the tiny county town of Statenville, only eight miles north, the new rails of The Atlantic, Valdosta and Western Railroad cut through Echols on their way from Valdosta to Jacksonville, Florida. Several planned towns popped up along the new rails, including tiny Haylow where the new line crossed the "Live Oak Connector," an old spur to Florida built way back in 1864. Nearby, the ill-fated town of Fruitland was laid out in 1906 and abandoned in 1909. All of this ushered in the new century in tiny Statenville, bringing with it a brief, unsure glimmer of New South promise and a new railroad. Both faded as quickly as it appeared.

The Echols County Courthouse at Statenville, built in 1899, demolished in 1956.

The 1864 "Live Oak Connector" from Dupont to Live Oak, Florida, was one of the first lines to branch off the "Main Trunk" of the old Atlantic and Gulf Railway, and the tiny Statenville Railway was one of the last. This ne'er-do-well spur is illustrative of an ongoing epidemic of railroad building which tangled steel rails into even the most isolated regions of the piney woods. Chartered in 1906 to serve A. G. Garbutt's expansive new lumber mill that was then rising near Statenville, the 14-mile line from Hay-low was six years in the building. Less than a decade after the completion of the line, the vast tracts of virgin timber were gone from Echols County. The great Garbutt mill was closed in 1920, and The Statenville Railway was abandoned four years later leaving tiny Statenville alone in an unlovely sea of stumps, and Haylow agitating to become the county seat.

Echols County had been created in 1858, and the county's first courthouse rose in the tiny village of Troublesome. This dubious appellation was changed to Statenville straightaway, and the original four-room court...