Actual Factual Georgia

Q: Wasn’t there a Georgia company that helped popularize candy canes?

A: You might find this to be a sweet story about Bob McCormack, who helped put the candy cane into Christmas. McCormack was an Alabama businessman who visited Albany in 1919 and decided to open a candy company there. He started the Famous Candy Co. and publicized his candy canes with an ad that featured his oldest daughter Anna Louise. He changed the name to Bobs' Candy Company in 1924, survived the Great Depression and a tornado that destroyed his facility in 1940 and expanded into peanut-themed snacks during World War II before refocusing on the candy cane in the 1950s. Thanks to the Keller Machine, which had been recently invented by Bob's brother-in-law, a Catholic priest named Harding Keller, Bobs' Candy quickly began mass-producing candy canes. Bobs was producing 1.8 million sticks daily and had national sales of $3.3 million by the end of the 1950s, according to The New Georgia Encyclopedia. By then, the name had been changed to Bobs Candies, and it remained a family-run business until it was sold to Farley's and Sathers Candy Co. in 2005. Like the ghosts in "A Christmas Carol," McCormack's name lives: Farley's and Sathers still produces candy canes and mints under the Bobs brand.

Q: There is a batholith or monadnock south of Highway 5 in Douglasville. Do you know the name of it? I work in Douglasville and recently moved to Canton, and am trying to identify Pine Mountain, Lost Mountain, and others not as obvious as Kennesaw Mountain and Sweat Mountain when I look south from Canton.

—William C. "Bill" Wesley, Canton

A: What you're looking at is neither a mountain nor a molehill, but most likely "some kind of a gneiss unit," a spokeswoman with the U.S. Geological Survey in Atlanta told me. The geologist she conferred with didn't see any geographic names in that area that would describe a monadnock, which is an isolated mountain, or batholith, which is defined as a "great mass of intruded igneous rock" that continues below the surface of the earth, like Stone Mountain. Wes Tallon, director of communications and community relations for Douglas County, wrote in an email that there are several larger hills and rocks in the area. Andy Mountain, which is west of Douglasville, between Villa Rica and Winston, is the highest point in the county at 1,340 feet, rising above both Cedar Mountain (1,257 feet) and Pine Mountain (1,180 feet).

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