1925: More of this and that

ROWDY IN SCOTTSVILLE – A boiling crowd on a warm September evening in the Scottsville community in 1935 ignited a near riot.  Somewhere between two and three hundred people gathered around when a passenger in a passing car threw a tear gas bomb into the burgeoning crowd.  The crowd had gathered around the Silver Moon restaurant to listen to the foot stompin’ sounds of an electric piano.  For the most part, the Dublin police found that they were behaving themselves despite the size of the crowd.  The tear gas agitated the crowd so much that the Silver Moon proprietor, Gaines Lott, called both the police and the sheriff’s office to prevent what Lott feared would become a riot.  Law enforcement officers returned and dispersed the disappointed music lovers.  Although Chief E.C.  Pierce found no suspects, he did believe that the culprit was a white man.  Mac. Tel. Sept. 24, 1925. 

NO SUPPLY PROBLEM  – COL. JAMES D. BARNETT – of Dublin graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1925.  While at the Point, Barnett was awarded a Gold Medal for being the best athlete in his class.  Col. Barnett served mainly in ordnance and supply units. Colonel Barnett of the Quartermaster Corps was awarded the Legion of Merit for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services to the United States as the commander of the 77th Ordnance Group from 1944 to 1945. Mac. Tel.,3.31.22 Atl. Con., 12.1.1945.

AND THE ANCIENT PASSED – Billy Horned died at the age of 115, having lived nearly all of the 19th century and a quarter of the 20th. Hannah Washington was born about the year 1818.  She lived as a slave of the Howard family for almost fifty years.  Her life spanned five wars and tremendous changes in lifestyles.  Hannah was somewhat of a legend in the Montrose community where she lived on the farm of G.N. Ross.  Mrs. Washington died at the age of 107 in April 1925.  Mac. Tel. 2.3.25, 4.29.25.

I HAVE A PINE TREE IN MY STOMACH – Willie Bryant was one lucky man.  Bryant and his twelve-year-old son went out to gather some firewood.  Bryant chose a tree and began to cut it about eight feet above the ground.  There was a two to three-inch pine sapling in Bryant’s way.  He cut off the top of the sapling about six feet above the ground.  When the bigger tree began to fall, Bryant lost his balance and fell to the ground. He fell directly on the top of the base of the smaller tree and was impaled in his stomach.  Bryant could not extricate himself until his son was able to cut down the impaling rod.  The boy pulled the tree out of his father’s stomach area and took him for treatment.  Miraculously, Willie Bryant survived.  Macon Telegraph, Nov. 2, 1925.

WRITHING IN THE DARK – Emmett Adams was traveling one night from Marie Baptist Church when one of his tires went flat.  Adams pulled off the road near a swamp and began the laborious task of changing a tire in the dark.  All of a sudden, Adams felt a strong tug on his pants.  Before he could turn around, the teeth of an attacker cut into his ankle.   Adams grabbed the closest weapon and fought back with a vengeance.  His nemesis stunned, Adams took a closer look and iscovr that he had been bitten by a large racoon.  For his safety, Dr. Ovid Cheek conducted an examination of the attacker to determine if he was rabid.  Atlanta Constitution, May 25, 1925.

THE SADDEST TRAGEDY – Amy Lee Oxford, a native of Dublin, was a promising, highly popular nurse at the Georgia State Sanitarium in Milledgeville.  On a typical late summer morning, Miss Oxford was walking through the hospital grounds.  She saw a male patient, thought to be harmlessly insane, working on the ground.  The deranged man, known as Willie Sims,  charged toward her and slammed the sharp end of his pickaxe into her skull, killing her instantly.   On the early morning of September 21, 1925, a vicious mob rushed into the hospital gate, threatened the guards, kidnapped Sims, and took him to Wilkinson County, where they beat him to death while he was chained to a tree.  Amy Oxford led the development of the therapy section to new heights in caring for her patients.  In 1928, the hospital named a ward of the therapy building in her memory.   Macon News, 4.7.1928, Atlanta Const. 1.23.1926, Macon Telegraph, 9.23.1925.