Mobile Homes Like No Others

By Tom Poland.  All photos by Tom Poland.

 

In the fall of 1967 I entered the University of Georgia and thanks to the Bulldogs I’ve been traveling Highway 378/78 to Athens ever since. That’s close to half a century of passing through the beautiful town of Washington, Georgia, named in honor of our first president. Consider me a “Roads” Scholar. Living across the Savannah as I do, on my way to Athens I often take my South Carolina friends through Washington so they can marvel at all the majestic Southern homes.

“I know Beaufort, Aiken, and Camden have many fine Southern homes,” I tell them, “but wait until you see Washington, Georgia.” I drive them down Robert Tombs Avenue and the homes elicit oohs and aahs from my football companions. But, guess what. I had no clue just how many beautiful and interesting homes Washington has until March 22. That’s when I journeyed to Washington to speak to the Kiwanis Club. Prior to speaking, Steve Blackmon gave me a tour of seven historic homes that had something unique in common. All had been moved in total or in part to their current location. One had had wings relocated to flank it on either side.

Steve discovered me thanks to his daughter, Myra, who had read my feature, “Remembering Danburg,” in Like the Dew, an online journal of Southern culture and politics. She told her father of my work and it wasn’t long before I got a call from him. Thus began the path that brought me to Washington March 22.

 

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I drove over from Carolina March 21 and stayed at my sister place in Lincolnton. Early the next morning I left Brenda’s to make the familiar drive to Washington. The crisp morning played out beneath blue skies. Not a cloud to be seen, which in reality was a bad thing. A cloud cover makes for uniform light when photographing buildings.

Arriving at Steve’s I met him and his wife, Eleanor. Their home represented the passage of time in comfort and beauty. A rare piano with intricate scrollwork and claw feet, brass candlesticks, family portraits, a metronome, and a rotary phone like Mom and Dad once had. It is what I deem a vintage Southern home.

 

 

Steve had made a list of eight homes to visit, complete with a timetable an airline scheduler would envy. (One home would be unavailable to us.) I appreciated the tight scheduling. A book event back in Columbia at 7 p.m. had me in a squeeze.

Camera gear in tow, Steve and I departed to make the rounds. I was in for a memorable day. Besides the star attractions—unique homes, I’d see a millstone inlaid among bricks as a walkway centerpiece, a volume of Jericho, The South Beheld, by James Dickey and Hubert Shuptrine. I’d hear a deflating story about a letter Mrs. Jefferson Davis left the wartime owners of Holly Court that was purloined during a home tour. I’d see Civil War artifacts and vintage oil paintings and remarkable old homes that share a unique heritage born out of necessity.

 

 

In the 1800s, the plagues of old age made going to see the doctor too much of a challenge. For others, fashionable things such as going into town, say, to enjoy the opera spurred changes. The solution? Well, it was something no one would consider today. They moved their home into town. Consider such homes the bona fide mobile home.

In 1978, a feature in The Christian Science Monitor, “The Traveling Homes of Washington, Ga.” found its way into the Washington Post. The feature quoted historian Robert M. “Skeet” Willingham Jr. “In the early 1800s, when boards were hand-hewn and nails were handmade, houses were not simply demolished when no longer needed. They were recycled,” said Willingham. “Our 19th-century counterparts knew much more about recycling than we do. If a certain home was no longer needed, it was either disassembled and rebuilt in another form or moved as it was to another location,” Willingham said.

 

 

According to the feature, Washington’s “prefab” houses were manor houses brought in from nearby plantations as it became fashionable to live in town between 1820 and 1840, when local farmers prospered after switching from tobacco to cotton farming.

Let’s return to an era when power lines and utility poles didn’t hem in roads. Conjure up teams of oxen hauling a house down a dirt lane. Not mules, mind you, but oxen. Now mules may have been used but handling them wasn’t always easy with their tendency to bolt. Oxen plod along, are reliable, and resilient. I’d surmise that moving a house best happens at a slow, steady pace. That would be what oxen do, and best of all, oxen are world-class strong.

The houses were moved on logs that rolled along similar to how a pencil rolls across a desk. How did they lift the homes onto the logs? First screw jacks and iron rods lifted the house and then the jacks would lower it into position onto logs. Ropes tied to the house and oxen rolled the house forward with logs being reset ahead of it as it inched its way to the new destination. Families, neighbors, and field hands shepherded the homes to their city location. In the 1978 feature, Willingham speculates that “several teams of fire oxen could have carried the load placed on a flat wagon made of long logs.” He added that it took several days to move a house 10 or 15 miles and then reassemble it. Of course it’s more complicated than that but that’s the big picture.

 

 

Steve loaned me a copy of At Home in Washington-Wilkes, copyright 1986 by Jane R. Newsome, “a collection of 84 distinctive old residences and other attractions in one of Georgia’s most historic towns.” See it pictured here in this column. Photographs of a few “mobile” homes are here for you to see as well. I’m sure South Carolina has similar homes but it’s said no town has as many as Washington, Georgia.
 

 

 

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]

 

Tom Poland is the author of twelve books and more than 1,000 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press released his book, Georgialina, A Southland As We Knew It, in November 2015 and his and Robert Clark’s Reflections Of South Carolina, Vol. II in 2014. The History Press of Charleston published Classic Carolina Road Trips From Columbia in 2014. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture and speaks often to groups across South Carolina and Georgia, “Georgialina.”