Volume 20, No. 2 • Summer 2002

Troup County and the 1930 Federal Census

Creeler, carder, spooler, twister, doffer, beamer, roper hand, card hand and spare hand. These terms may seem archaic to some and unrecognizable to others, but they were definitely familiar terms to the many census takers who counted the citizens of Troup County for the 1930 Federal Census. The Troup County Archives now has the complete 1930 Census for Georgia and some neighboring Alabama counties available on microfilm for public use.

The lack of an index to the 1930 census could be of a slight disadvantage to some but others will find that patiently viewing pages of data to be a delight. Suddenly, there are the names of your family, their friends, and information about the residents of neighborhoods!

Of interest to genealogists will be the general information available about local citizens such as name, age, place of birth, birthplace of parents, address, and marital status. Others may find interest in the many types of occupations, such as those listed for workers in the cotton mills above. Some may remember occupations such as furnace man, shoemaker, stenographer, timekeeper, bootblack, bellboy, and delivery boy, which are no longer seen.

Troup County was an international center in the 1930s with a large number of immigrant families living and working in the community. Families from Russia, Poland, Greece, China, Assyria, Austria, and Germany to name but a few had found a homeland in Troup County. Charlie Yem, from China ran a laundry at 114 Greenville Street. Grecian Nick Xinor, a proprietor of a restaurant, lodged in the Park Hotel. Joseph Delancy, born in Russia, was a Real Estate agent. Other families such as the Goldsteins, Struletz, Jabaleys, Kaplans, Mansours and Solomons all contributed to the economic growth and cultural enrichment of the county.

One of the more interesting areas counted in the census was 112 Hines Street, the site of the Troup County Jail now the Chattahoochee Valley Art Museum. Here the census taker found twenty-four prisoners, black and white, twenty-three males and one female, ranging in age from fourteen to fifty-eight. Of these unlucky inhabitants of Hines Street, thirteen were married, and four were from Alabama. All were under the care of F. Virgil Dollar, Deputy Sheriff, and his wife Sallie, who listed her occupation as dressmaker.

Georgia Trust - a Recap of the Meeting

On Saturday, LaGrange and Troup High School teachers lead the group on a “virtual” tour of Troup County and held a lively game of architectural bingo. The Georgia Trust gave awards to individuals and groups and Governor Roy Barnes gave a moving talk about the importance of community. He also stressed the importance of sharing our place and our history with students.

A picnic lunch saw a demand for shade. Temperatures reached the low 90s -- awfully warm for April but everyone appreciated the fact that rain held off until the next weekend. Then participants toured homes and gardens. The day ended with receptions at Bellevue and the Cauble House, dinner at the Oaks, and dessert at Lamar Dodd Art Center.

Sunday morning dawned to another beautiful day. Trust members enjoyed brunch and tours at Ferrell Gardens at Hills and Dales. The Callaway estate provided a beautiful conclusion to the meeting. By all accounts, everyone left happy and at least a few people were ready to move to LaGrange that day!

The success of this meeting is a credit to many! Thanks are due to individuals as varied Archives staff who moved balloons and signs from site to site, Beth Godwin who made Friday’s cakes, the ladies of Elms and Roses Garden Club Council who made beautiful flower arrangements and helped host, staff at LaGrange College, Susan and Stan Hall who came to the aid of the caterers, members of the planning meeting, and the many volunteers who graciously served as hosts and guides. THANK YOU EVERYONE!

Vintage Troup County Postcards

The volume will sell for $19.99 and will make wonderful Christmas or birthday gifts! The authors of the volume are Kaye Lanning Minchew, F. Clark Johnson, Chris Cleaveland, and Stephen Johnson. Over two hundred postcards are included.

The volume includes something for everyone -- old cars, great bridges, historic buildings, a wide variety of houses, floods, commercial structures around the county, schools and colleges, churches, and much more. Dating primarily from 1905-1940, postcards depict LaGrange, West Point, and Hogansville plus nearby Valley, Alabama. The first couple of decades of the twentieth century are considered to be a golden age of postcards. This was a time of beautiful color postcards and of more frequent correspondence via the mail than we have in today’s e-mail and telephone society.

Minchew becomes President of Rotary

The Rotary Club of LaGrange, which organized in 1923, celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary in 1998. Minchew and Charis Acree were the first two women to become members of the club.

The Rotary Club has over 135 members and participates in a variety of community activities. Rotarians served as marshals in the Sweet Land of Liberty Parade and have helped with Special Olympics for the past three years. Upcoming projects include distributing a workbook for character education in the workplace and supporting a booklet aimed at sharing Troup County’s immigrant and ethnic heritage with literacy projects, GED classes, and senior high students throughout the county. The club is part of Rotary International. The club meets each Wednesday at Highland Country Club at noon.

Heritage Education : Ethnic Heritage and Minority Resources

Summer school for nineteen Troup County teachers began Monday, June 10, with the start of a Heritage Education workshop sponsored by the Troup County Archives and the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation. Kaye Minchew, Director of the Troup County Archives, Clark Johnson and Barry Jackson, taught this year’s theme, Ethnic Heritage and Minority Resources.

During the week, teachers toured Downtown LaGrange noting businesses established by immigrants and buildings designed and built by black entrepreneur, Horace King and his sons. Tours of Congregation Beth El, Warren Temple United Methodist Church, the Hamilton Road, Union Street, and East Depot Street Neighborhoods, allowed the class to discuss contributions made by churches and families to the cultural, religious and educational enrichment of LaGrange. A tour of Pinewood Cemetery in West Point, Georgia, acquainted teachers with the Jewish contributions to that city while a tour of Downtown West Point noted architectural styles.

Each participant received a “Teacher’s Resource Kit” containing a collection of primary documents, maps, and photographs on Troup County history for classroom use. Innovative ways of incorporating Troup County history into classes on U.S. or Georgia History, Citizenship, and subjects like English, architecture, math, agriculture, economics, art and music were presented. This year’s class also included a computer workshop where teachers studied not only documents and photographs available on the Internet but also at www.troupdigitalarchives.thclibrary.net/lagrange/start.htm.

Next year’s workshop theme will be Military History of Troup County.

Interning at the Troup County Archives

As a new graduate student at Auburn University, the first class I attended was Principles of Archival Theory, taught by Dr. Jeff Jakeman. From the introduction of the subject I was hooked, the class combined my love of history with the practical world of business. To one who spent over 20 years in the consumer finance industry the combination proved irresistible. I eagerly enrolled in an additional archive class, one that explored the history of the profession. Because of these archive classes, my decision on the two minor fields of study for the Ph.D. program was simple: Archives, coupled with American History to 1865, were the minor fields, and American History from 1865 with a concentration in women’s history, was the major field.

Part of the criteria for earning this minor was participating in an internship with an active archive. Dr. Jakeman often commented during class upon Troup County’s good fortune to have both a vibrant archive and a professionally trained archivist in Kaye Minchew. The county’s good fortune became my own when Ms. Minchew agreed to allow me the experience of working as an intern during the summer session. Not only does the Troup County Archives serve the needs of those interested in historical research, it is the repository for many of the records and documents generated by both the city and the county governments. Working in this setting has exposed both sides of the archival world and supplemented my academic training with practical knowledge.

My most interesting experience has been working with the Guinn Family Collection, a manuscript collection that extends from the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. This collection is ideal for a novice, and furthermore, is the perfect collection for someone with my historical interests and professional background. The collection contains artifacts ranging from a 1920s car-advertising device to a 1940s era ice cream scoop. The Guinn collection includes books that became part of the archives rare book collection, a large photograph collection, oversized documents and photos, scrapbooks, examples of World War II victory mail, an extensive collection of Christmas cards, and post cards from Virginia Guinn’s travels.

John Guinn owned and operated three businesses during the first half of the twentieth century. Guinn’s business records were scattered throughout the 12 assorted boxes and cartons initially housing the collection, and were intermingled with a wide range of personal family records. Several years’ experience operating a small business provided me with a basis for sorting and bringing a semblance of order to the documents. Furthermore, the bulk of the collection is concentrated in the historical era in which I am most interested, the early twentieth century, making the work particularly valuable to me. After spending hours poring over letters, business records, and deeds that detailed the minutia of the lives of the Guinn family, I now understand the difficulty historians face in working in archival Internship settings; we do want to read every document, to keep every piece of paper for it current or potential historical importance, both of which can be extremely time consuming and take much space for storage. Working with the Guinn collection and with the well-trained staff at the Troup County Archives gave me the skill to cull through records and identify and keep only those records of historical significance and those with a connection to Troup County.

The other aspect of my time at the Archives, working with government records and documents, proved equally fascinating. The Archives receives numerous requests for court records, settled divorce cases, and employment files, as well as police and sheriff case files. Many of these records are open to the public, and need little more than a date or name to locate the appropriate document. School records, however, are not open to the public, a fact stressed to all that work at the archives.

From working with genealogists researching family trees, to providing copies of high school records to adults now returning to college, to bringing order to a collection of documents that detail life in LaGrange during the early twentieth century, the entire archival internship experience has been rewarding and educational. Through my experience, I have received the type of education one can only gain from the practical application of academic knowledge. To my pleasure I found that an archive is the marriage of history and business, as I first believed

Students

This newsletter is a quarterly publication of the Troup County Historical Society and Archives, 136 Main Street, P.O. Box 1051, LaGrange, GA 30241.

Officers:

• President - Bit Taylor
• Vice-President - Oliver Greene
• Secretary - Sally Macomber
• Treasurer - Jim Crane
• Past-President - Karen Scarborough
• Board of Trustee Representative - Charles D. Hudson

Staff of the Archives:

• Director - Kaye Lanning Minchew
• Reference Assistant - Clark Johnson
• Accessions Archivist -- Barry Jackson
• Bookkeeper - Diana Thomas
• Exhibits -- Charles Kelly
• Assistants - Shirley Dykes, Jamie Gossett, Forrest Johnson, IV, Christian Johnson