1925: A year full of highlights

James A. Thomas, a local attorney and a former teenage ensign in the Confederate army, was elected State Commander of the Confederate Veterans in 1916 and  National Commander of the United Confederate Veterans in 1925.  Gen. Thomas served the last three years of his life as Honorary National Commander. Gen. Thomas brought the Georgia Confederate Reunion to Dublin in 1920.    

In the first days of the summer of 1925, “Shoeless Joe” Jackson and his Waycross Coastliners played a railroad team from Macon on the 12th District Fairground field

Thomas Hardwick, a former governor, United States senator and congressman,  published The Courier Herald for two years. A weekly edition, which carried Gov. Hardwick’s political opinions, was one of the largest circulated papers in the state. Gov. Hardwick, who lived in the old Peacock house at the corner of Academy Avenue and South Calhoun Street, made U.S. history when, in 1922, he appointed Rebecca Felton the first female United States Senator. 

In 1925, the voters of Dublin voted to sell the city’s electric power plant to Georgia Power Company. One of the company’s first managers in Dublin was John J. “Jack” McDonough. McDonough, a Georgia Tech football star of the early 1920s and member of that university’s Athletic Hall of Fame, became Georgia Power Company’s seventh president in 1956.   

A devastating fire destroyed the 12th Congressional District Fair Ground on Troup Street in October 1925.

January 1925 saw the largest monthly rainfall ever recorded in Laurens County, with 14.48 inches. That year saw very hot weather, very cold weather, droughts, and torrential rainfall. September 1925 may have been the hottest month in the history of Laurens County. Four of the twenty-five highest recorded temperatures occurred between Sept. 4 and Sept. 5.

On these two sizzling September days, the local weather station’s thermometer measured 108. On the 8th and 9th, the high temp dropped to 106 and 107, respectively. On the 20th, the high dropped to a cooler 106 degrees. The 108-degree days still stand as the 2nd highest recorded temperature in history.  

During the year, the temperature officially reached 100 degrees or higher on 29 days, setting the third most in county history, coming behind 1954 (41) and 1980.

On the low side, the temperature dropped below freezing 29 times, making the 25th year of the 20th Century just about average. For what it’s worth, the low temperature of the year occurred right after Christmas when the thermometers dropped to a bone-chilling 12 degrees.

Speaking of wet months, around the second week of January 1925, 90 years ago, it began to rain in Laurens County and all around the South. The rains poured down, heavily and almost daily. The rivers and creeks began to rise. It rained some more. And, then some more. The floods came and came again. Not since 1887 had so much rain had so much of a profound effect on our area as during that rainy month, 90 winters ago.

Wooden bridges, the mainstay of the county’s infrastructure, were damaged beyond calculation. The steel bridge across Hunger and Hardship Creek was six to eight feet underwater and totally useless as an entrance or exit along the northern edge of the city. 

The 1920 Oconee River Bridge, somewhat new and modern with improved causeways,  was holding, but railroad officials dared not take loaded freight trains over the raging river as it relentlessly pounded the 35-year-old columns with tons of pressure.  Days and days of incessant rain brought the Oconee above its flood stage of 22 feet. “Every branch has turned to a creek, and every creek is now a river,” wrote a Dublin newspaperman. By the 22nd, county residents had reported that nearly every wooden bridge in the county had been swept away. Five miles below Dublin on present-day Highway 441, the long, wooden bridge over Turkey Creek at Garretta had a 20-foot-wide fatal, gaping section swept away in the deluge, cutting off the city’s main highway to the south. 

I wonder how the people of Laurens County will view what we have experienced this year a century from now?