Ed Jackson and Charles Pou

Carl Vinson Institute of Government

The University of Georgia

August 18

1905 Gov. Joseph Terrell signed acts creating:

• Jeff Davis County (named for former Confederate president Jefferson Davis) out of areas of Appling and Coffee counties;
• Stephens County (named for former governor Alexander Stephens) out of areas of Habersham and Franklin counties;
• Toombs County (named for former congressman, U.S. senator, and secessionist Robert Toombs) out of areas of Tattnall, Montgomery, and Emanuel counties; and
• Turner County (named for former congressman and Georgia Supreme Court justice Henry Turner) out of areas of Irwin, Wilcox, Dooly, and Worth counties.

Respectively, these become Georgia's 142nd, 143rd, 144rd, and 145th counties. Because a 1904 constitutional amendment set the maximum number of counties in the state at 145, no new counties could be created in the future without amending the state constitution.

1908 The Georgia General Assembly adopted a joint resolution urging Congress to create a U.S. Health Department. The memorial listed a host of reasons why the federal government should act, including the financial cost of treatment and the loss of life from tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and other communicable diseases; the fact that "disease and degeneracy are strong factors in the causation of crime"; that national action is needed since only 23 states then maintained vital statistics; and because "It is more humane and noble to destroy the enemies of health when they touch our territories rather than allow the conditions that are inviting them in and then undertake to fight them when they are bush whacking us from every side of the road as we travel from section to section and from State to State, watching an opportunity when they might leap from the walls of a house or couch at night or streams as they trickle through the forest or food as we feed out bodies." [Yes, that is the actual language used in the joint resolution.]

1913 The nineteenth day in the trial of Leo Frank opened with another group of character witnesses on behalf of the defendant. Then, Leo Frank finally took the witness stand. For four hours, he calmly but firmly he told his side of the story. According to Frank, detectives had tried to distort everything he said in order to incriminate him. He freely admitted to being nervous after hearing of the murder, claiming any man in his position would be nervous -- especially after seeing the body of Mary Phagan. He said Mary came in for her pay soon after 12:00 noon on April 26th, returned a few minutes later to ask if the shipment of metal had arrived (Phagan's job was putting metal tips on pencils), then left his office and he never saw her alive again. He worked on a financial report that afternoon, then went home. Frank said that Jim Conley's testimony was all lies, and that he never saw Conley that day. Frank concluded by answering those who had questioned why he wouldn't talk to the police or press: "Some newspaper man has called me 'the silent man in the Tower.' Gentlemen, this is the time and here is the place! I have told you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Click here for a detailed accounting of the case.

1916 State law prohibiting females from holding civil office or performing any civil functions was amended to allow women to serve as clerk to the ordinary (probate judge) or clerk to the court of ordinary by an act signed on this day by Gov. Nathaniel Harris.

1916 The General Assembly adopted a joint resolution naming the Cherokee Rose as the official "floral emblem" of Georgia.

1918 Gov. Hugh Dorsey signed an act prohibiting employees of hotels, restaurants, barber shops and other public places from receiving tips, and further prohibiting employers from allowing their employees to receive tips.

1919 Gov. Dorsey signed legislation creating a Board of Public Welfare with responsibility for inspecting county jails and state or local institutions "which are an eleemosynary, charitable, correctional or reformatory character, or which are for the care, custody or training of the orphaned, defective, dependent, delinquent or criminal classes" and making an annual report to the governor. On the same day, Dorsey signed companion legislation creating the Community Service Commission, which was entrusted with a broad range of powers -- from investigating "all problems of reconstruction and matters involving the general public welfare" to helping secure employment for returning soldiers and sailors.

1919 Gov. Dorsey signed an act regulating architects, setting minimum qualifications and creating a board to examine and license architects.

1919 Gov. Dorsey signed an act creating the Georgia Illiteracy Commission, which had the goal conducting research and making recommendations to eliminate adult illiteracy in Georgia.

1919 The Georgia General Assembly adopted a joint resolution calling on Congress to designate the Okefenokee Swamp a national park. The action represented an about face from a Feb. 26, 1854 act of the General Assembly that described the Okefenokee as "a large tract of unimproved, and at present worse than useless land" and called on the governor to hire an engineer to study the possibility of draining the Okefenokee in order to make it fit for settlement and cultivation.

1924 Gov. Clifford Walker signed legislation repealing the 1918 act (also signed on this day) prohibiting tipping.

1924 Gov. Walker signed a joint resolution proposing a constitutional amendment to allow the consolidation of city and county governments in any county with a city of a population of 52,900 or more. (This appears to have been the first serious effort at city-county consolidation in Georgia.)

1927 Eleanor Rosalynn Smith was born in Plains, Ga. A month before her 19th birthday, she would marry Jimmy Carter, thereafter giving birth to three sons and one daughter. Six months shy of her 44th birthday, she became First Lady of Georgia, and six months shy of her 50th birthday, she became the First Lady of the U.S.

1952 On her 25th birthday, Rosalynn Carter gave birth to Donnel Jeffrey (Jeff) Carter in New London, Connecticut, where husband U.S. Navy Lt. Jimmy Carter was stationed.

1973 Hank Aaron hit his 1,378 extra-base hit surpassing the record previously held by Stan Musial.

Georgia towns and cities incorporated by acts approved on August 18:

1903 Mystic (Irwin County)

1906 Chatsworth (Murray County), Epworth (Fannin County), and Oak Park (Emanuel County)

1908 Leon (Dodge County)

1911 Stonewall (Campbell, now Fulton County) and Tyrone (Fayette County)

1913 Helen (White County), Mauk (Taylor County), and Reno (Grady County)

1916 Pearson (Coffee County)

1919 Farmington (Oconee County)

In Their Own Words on This Day. . .

1861 In Richmond County, Gertrude Thomas experienced the emotions universally felt by all who send loved ones off to war:

"I have realized one of the most eventful moments in my life -- Mr. Thomas has left for the seat of war -- Yesterday afternoon The Richmond Hussars struck their tents and last night left for the Old Dominion. All day yesterday it rained. Mr. Thomas had his trunk packed the day before but there was constantly something to be added to it. For several days I had been busy preparing and finishing off. Friday it rained almost all day and the weather was in unison with my feelings- The long suppressed emotion would have vent and for several days I have wept when I would reflect how soon I would be left alone. . . ."

Source: Virginia Ingraham Burr (ed.), The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1848-1889 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 191-192.

1865 From Washington, Ga., a distressed Eliza Andrews recorded in her journal a lengthy tirade of her contempt for the national weekly newspapers of the day because of what they reported about the South:

"Just returned from a visit to Woodstock . . . . On reaching home, I found that sister had arrived, with the children. There was a big mail, too, with letters from our friends in Richmond and Baltimore, and a quantity of Northern papers they sent us. I hate the Yankees more and more, every time I look at one of their horrid newspapers and read the lies they tell about us, while we have our mouths closed and padlocked. The world will not hear our story, and we must figure just as our enemies choose to paint us. The pictures in "Harper's Weekly" and "Frank Leslie's" tell more lies than Satan himself was ever the father of. I get in such a rage when I look at them that I sometimes take off my slipper and beat the senseless paper with it. No words can express the wrath of a Southerner on beholding pictures of President Davis in woman's dress; and Lee, that star of light before which even Washington's glory pales, crouching on his knees before a beetle-browed image of "Columbia," suing for pardon! And these in the same sheet with disgusting representations of the execution of the so-called "conspirators" in Lincoln's assassination. Nothing is sacred from their disgusting love of the sensational. Even poor Harold's sisters, in their last interview with him, are pictured for the public delectation, in "Frank Leslie's." Andersonville, one would think, was bad enough as it was, to satisfy them, but no; they must lie even about that, and make it out ten times worse than the reality -- never realizing that they themselves are the only ones to blame for the horrors of that "prison pen," as they call it. They were the ones that refused to exchange prisoners. Our government could not defend its own cities nor feed its own soldiers; how could it help crowding its prisoners and giving them hard fare? I have seen both Northern and Southern prisoners, and the traces of more bitter suffering were shown in the pinched features and half-naked bodies of the latter than appeared to me even in the faces of the Andersonville prisoners I used to pass last winter, on the cars. The world is filled with tales of the horrors of Andersonville, but never a word does it hear about Elmira and Fort Delaware. The "Augusta Transcript" was suppressed, and its editor imprisoned merely for publishing the obituary of a Southern soldier, in which it was stated that he died of disease "contracted in the icy prisons of the North." Splendid monuments are being reared to the Yankee dead, and the whole world resounds with paeans because they overwhelmed us with their big, plundering armies, while our Southern dead lie unheeded on the fields where they fought so bravely, and our real heroes, our noblest and best, the glory of human nature, the grandest of God's works, are defamed, vilified, spit upon. Oh! you brave unfortunates! history will yet do you justice. Your monuments are raised in the hearts of a people whose love is stronger than fate, and they will see that your memory does not perish. Let the enemy triumph; they will only disgrace themselves in the eyes of all decent people. They are so blind that they boast of their own shame. They make pictures of the ruin of our cities and exult in their work. They picture the destitution of Southern homes and gloat over the desolation they have made. "Harper's" goes so far as to publish a picture of Kilpatrick's "foragers" in South-West Georgia, displaying the plate and jewels they have stolen from our homes! "Out of their own mouths they are condemned," and they are so base they do not even know that they are publishing their own shame."

Source: Eliza Frances Andrews, The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1908), pp. 370-373.

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© Carl Vinson Institute of Government, The University of Georgia

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