Drive along Jot-Em-Down Road in northeast Forsyth County and you’ll pass the rolling countryside where the history of this county has played out in the most earthbound way.
This was Cherokee Indian land before the land lottery of 1832, and farmland for a century and a half after that. Now those farms are giving ground to housing developments. But, if Jo Ann Martin has her say, the history won’t be lost.
Martin, 75, is one of several hundred Forsyth County families compiling family histories to be included in a volume that will be published next year by the Historical Society of Forsyth County, and her deadline is fast approaching.
“I’ve got until December 31st,” she said one recent morning, sitting at her dining room table, and sipping coffee while, on 55 acres out back, cows grazed on land that has been in her family since the 1820s.
She handed a visitor a one-page family tree that started with Joel Bennett Sr., born in South Carolina in 1765, and ended with this notation: “My grandchildren are the ninth generation (seventh generation on this Bennett land as handed down over the years back in the 1800s.)”
It’s a simple and straightforward story, she said, remarkable mainly for the depth of her family's roots on this patch of earth. Such roots are uncommon in modern America, and especially modern metro Atlanta.
Martin's forbears did what so many other early settlers did who lived up and down this road in what’s known as the Chestatee Community (old-timers remember it by another name: Possum Holler, for the way news would be relayed before telephones, with one neighbor yelling next door to another).
“A lot of this story is just about daily living on the farm,” she said. “Chopping stove wood and feeding the hogs. About the good old days, about how I had Christian parents who carried me to church and we respected our elders.”
Such stories are important in a county that has gone through nearly a quadruple boom in population (from about 44,000 to about 175,000) in two decades and is fast erasing vestiges of its past, said Martha McConnell, vice president of the Historical Society of Forsyth County who is overseeing the compilation of the family stories.
“It wasn’t that long ago that when you graduated from high school, unless you were a farmer, you had to go to Atlanta to get a job,” said McConnell. “There weren’t any jobs here until Wilson opened the chicken plant in the 1940s. Then we had a sewing plant, the old pants factory.”
Now Forsyth, which borders Lake Lanier on the northern edge of metro Atlanta, is one of the wealthiest counties in the nation based on median household income ($83,000) and the site of many international businesses and residents who, before they moved here, had never heard of it. .
The transformation is evident on Jot-Em-Down Road. Two decades ago, nothing but farms lined the road. Now a handful of old family homesteads are interspersed with five or six housing developments whose growth has been slowed by the recession. But when the economy bounces back, so will the boom, said McConnell. That lends urgency to her mission of preserving stories of the past.
“We’ve got about 100 stories already, and maybe another hundred we expect to get before the deadline,” said McConnell. “But you know how that is, they’re going to wait until the last minute.”
The society will next year also issue a compilation on CD of three volumes of history it’s already published: “Forsyth County, An Album From The Garland Bagley Collection”; “Forsyth County History Stories;” and “Forsyth County Twentieth Century Changes.”
The Martin family already has contributed in other ways to the chronicle of early life in Forsyth. The family’s meat box – a box where, before there was refrigeration, a butchered hog would be covered with salt and the meat cured to be preserved – is an exhibit at the Fowler House, a historic farm bought by the county in 2001.
And Martin herself will record the moments of her personal history as they intersected with larger events, such as the tornado that swept through Possum Holler on April 11, 1944.
“I was just nine years old and I didn’t see it, but I remember hearing it,” she said. “It sounded like a freight train. I remember the barter man was out at the house at the time. He would come around in his truck and bring things like sugar and flower, and you would trade him for that with butter and eggs. He was there when it hit.”
She said that afterward “Hubert Patterson’s barn was sitting in the middle of the road,” and one man was dead. “Mr. Joe Brooks was coming out of his chicken house and a piece of flying wood hit him in the head and killed him.”
Much of the Martin family history is already recorded for the ages in the etched headstones of Salem Baptist Church cemetery up the road. Her family joined when the church was founded in April 1843. They’ve attended ever since, and been laid to rest there, too.
