The Georgia & Florida Railroad began with bright promise, but
like many other enterprises in the early twentieth-century South,
it experienced hard times. The story begins in 1906,
when-responding to a perceived need for better connections to
northern markets-a group of entrepreneurs led by prominent Virginia
banker John Skelton Williams began to cobble together logging short
lines to create more than 350 miles of railroad connecting Augusta,
Georgia, with Madison, Florida. At first the G&F triggered
growth in its region as several new towns sprang up or expanded
along its lines. By 1915, however, the economic dislocations caused
by World War I threw the G&F into receivership, and a few years
later the G&F came close to dismemberment. Fortunately,
shippers and investors rallied to the railroad's cause, and
business conditions improved. In 1926 the road was reorganized and,
under pressure to "expand or die," built to Greenwood, South
Carolina. The Great Depression forced the G&F into bankruptcy,
and after its record-length receivership, it was acquired by the
Southern Railway in 1963. When the Southern Railway dissolved the
corporation and abandoned much of the former trackage, the G&F
became the "Gone & Forgotten." Yet in its 57-year lifespan the
G&F did much to bring about agricultural diversification and
relative prosperity in the wiregrass region of southern Georgia and
northern Florida. Offering insights on social and economic
conditions in the South from the late nineteenth century to the
mid-twentieth century, Grant's study of this obscure yet noteworthy
railroad will appeal to those interested in transportation,
business, railroad, and Southern regional history.
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