When I read this article in the Brunswick News this morning, I knew I had to share it with you who regularly read the Potlatch Tertulia. As you know, Georgia is on the firing line these days in national politics as a result of the 2020 presidential election and continuing strife over election reform. Reading this piece about Georgia politics suggests that Republicans are revisiting Georgia history in their efforts to win votes and control elections. Today’s Republicans are yesterday’s Democrats in our state. And the motives are as nefarious as ever; some things never change.
COLUMN/PERSPECTIVE: County consolidation plan gets new attention
By Terry Dickson, The Brunswick News, February 21, 2022
People liked to call the late Kiliaen Townend by his catchy nickname. His colleagues in the Georgia House and his friends called him Kil. When he headed a failed effort in the 1980s to consolidate some of Georgia’s 159 counties, his opponents — who were legion — added an L.
Townsend’s first vote came in 1965 when his colleagues refused to seat newly elected Julian Bond because Bond loudly opposed the war in Vietnam. Townsend, a Republican, voted to seat Bond, and he ultimately was, but only after the Georgia House lived up to its proud history of embarrassing the state from sea to shining sea.
Townsend’s most controversial action in his 28 years in the legislature grew from his belief that Georgia has too many counties. New counties had been created, he said, because people wanted political power in Atlanta. In the olden days, the county unit system decided Georgia primary elections. With Democrats dominating, statewide elections were over with the primaries.
It worked this way, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia:
Counties were classified by population into three groups, urban counties, town counties and rural counties. The eight urban counties got six votes each, town counties four votes each and rural two. The result was a third of the population had nearly 60 percent of the votes. In 1960, the combined 6,890 residents of Georgia’s three smallest counties, Echols, Glascock and Quitman, had a vote equal to Fulton County, which had 556,326 people.
Townsend said “it made no sense at all.”
State Rep. Darlene Thomas, R-Thomasville, wants to revive Townsend’s idea and consolidate some counties. It would result in tremendous savings and increased efficiencies by cutting the number of school systems, sheriffs, court systems and so on.
The county unit system died when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its “one man, one vote” decision, meaning every vote was equal. For the 1964 election, Fulton County, where Townsend domiciled, went from three state representatives to two dozen. Townsend won one of the new seats.
In addition to an irritating habit of making sense, Townsend looked like the sort of man who would wear a bow tie, and one doubts he had much denim in his Buckhead closet. To whittle down the number of counties, he had to convince the salt-of-the-earth country folks whose home library consisted solely of the family Bible and who got dirty at work.
In a 2006 interview with Sheryl Vogt for an oral history, Townsend said that many counties, including Talliaferro, had “no reason to exist. They have 2,000 or 3,000 people. No business, no jobs, no (healthcare), no education and no law enforcement, really.”
The current population of Talliaferro is 1,680. It has one school building, a kindergarten through 12th grade facility.
At the time of the interview, there were 33 sheriffs in jail because, poorly paid, they took payoffs from drug runners, Townsend said. Education also suffered from a lack of revenue in small counties.
“Education, we are last because who’s going to teach in Podunk County with a bunch of parents, who,” Townsend said, “have no interest in education.”
(There is no Podunk County, Ga., but you figure it would have made the list of 159. Besides, under Townsend’s plan, Jeff Davis County would have probably disappeared, and that was unthinkable.)
I was in Waycross when Townsend conducted a public hearing there on consolidation. Townsend said one small county sheriff had warned him he couldn’t assure his protection “from irate citizens.” As if that sheriff who was likely to lose his job when his county merged into a larger one was not irate, Townsend said.
I’m also sure that sheriff was not Ware County Sheriff Herbert Bond, among the most honorable and honest of Georgia’s 159 sheriffs at the time.
At the presentation in Waycross, it was noted that the average education in rural Georgia was 8th grade. A man, whom Townsend described as in his 50s and “scrabby looking,” stepped to the microphone and asked, “Mr. Townsend? What’s wrong with an eighth grade education? I only have a third grade education.”
That may have been the late Harry Thrift. The name Thrift was qualification enough to win an election in Ware County, and it still goes a long way. The enormous Thrift family were among the tough people who built Ware County, much of which is swamp, from pine gum, pulp wood and tobacco, at least until the railroad got there.
Ware wasn’t among the seven original counties. Burke, Camden, Charlton, Effingham, Glynn, Liberty, Richmond and Wilkes stretched along the coast and up the west bank of the Savannah River. The Creek and the Cherokee nations owned the rest.
Georgia and the feds started nibbling away at Indian territory creating counties as they went, but after taking it all, the politics started. Echols was carved out of a couple of counties in 1858. Like Taliaferro, it has one school building and, last time I checked, one traffic light and no incorporated cities thus no mayors, but it has a Dollar General.
Brantley was born in 1920 with the county seat in Hoboken until some armed men came in the night and moved all the county records to Nahunta. Mid-county Nahunta is also the demarcation point on whether residents shop or get hospitalized in Brunswick or Waycross. (I would now like to apologize to my friends in Brantley County for referring to the Brunswick Walmart as Nahunta by the Sea.) Besides, I also see a lot of McIntosh County tags in the Walmart lot.
Whether you think Townsend’s consolidation idea had any merit, you have to agree with his assessment of politicians.
“They give up any principle they have on almost anything to win votes,” he told Vogt, “no matter what it is…”
I remember when this idea was first broached. Many people in my home county–Telfair–thought we ought to join with our neighbors in Wheeler County. Discussions went on for months, but finally were called off. The reason? A new name. Some wanted to call the new consolidated county Welfare, a combination of the two names, while still others, noting the flight of young people to metropolitan areas, were stuck on another combination, Farewell. Just didn’t work out!
Ah, come on…