Since then, the law has been updated to provide more protection to landowners. If they refuse, the company is threatening to seize the land by taking advantage of Georgia’s eminent domain law, designed in the 19th century at a time when the expansion of railways was almost always deemed a public good. The railroad company asserts it has the right to force landowners to sell the portions of their properties needed for the project. Currently, the quarry relies on trucks to ship its gravel. In the Sandersville Railroad Company’s case, the rail spur would connect a local gravel and sand quarry to the CSX rail tracks that run along a state highway nearby. A rail spur provides access from the main line to an industrial or commercial area, where it dead ends. Tarbutton III, the Sandersville Railroad Company plans to construct a rail spur, a separate track that is connected to the main rail line.
The owner is more than 90 years old and lives alone. The Sandersville Railroad Company plan calls for tracks to run directly behind this home on Maggie Reynolds Road in Sparta, Georgia. Like many towns in the county, Sparta remains deeply segregated, with white families seeded throughout local political and business leadership, and Black families making up a majority of residents living below the poverty line. The dispute is exposing long-existing fault lines in Hancock County, one of the richest in Georgia when cotton was king and now one of the poorest. Distressed that what they have built over generations could be taken against their will, they have galvanized in opposition to the plan. Life for the Smith and Garrett families – and for the predominantly Black community whose properties stand in the way of the Sandersville Railroad Company’s plan to construct a 4.5-mile rail line – has not been quiet since. “He says, ‘You need to read that, because a railroad guy named Ben Tarbutton is getting ready to run a train through your backyard.’” “He asks my husband, ‘Did you see the letter?’” said Janet Smith, Mark Smith’s wife. Though the visitor, Donald Garrett, lives with his wife, Sally, just down the road on about 90 acres he inherited from his great-grandfather, the two families had never known each other. So when Mark Smith, the grandson of James Blaine Smith, answered his door to a white man on a hot day last summer, the visit was unexpected.
Galilee and the graveyard where their loved ones are buried. Still, for almost a century, those 600 acres of rich furrows, pine trees and still ponds have remained Smith family plots, and Smiths have lived on them quietly, staying close to their deeply rooted community of mostly Black families, their church called St.
Some moved away, joined the Army, came back. Over the years, white men would try to take his land, but Smith held on, becoming the proud patriarch of a prosperous family.Īs the family grew, the land was divided among its members. The company the hard-working farmer founded on the property in Hancock County – Smith Produce – became a success, first selling cotton, then peas, butterbeans and corn. But he had big dreams for the tract he had been leasing for years, driving a mule to plow its fertile rows and grow cotton.Įventually, 97 years ago, Smith amassed enough to trade his harvest for the land. The descendant of enslaved people, Smith was a poor farmer living in a shack just outside a city called Sparta. It was 1926 and Jim Crow reigned in the American South when James Blaine Smith managed something rare for a Black man in the middle of Georgia: He acquired 600 acres of land.
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