Georgia County Government - September 2008 - (Page 39)

Georgia’s Grand Old Courthouses The Upson County Courthouse at Thomaston Built in 1908. Frank Milburn, architect. By Wilber W. Caldwell Ocmulgee seemed to spring up from wild and solitary wilderness as if by magic. Thomaston was typical of many robust West Georgia towns, but unlike its neighbors, Thomaston built three antebellum cotton mills. Meanwhile, a group of Upson County investors obtained a charter for The Thomaston and Barnesville Railroad in 1838, but not much was accomplished. For almost 20 years, a lot of railroad talking begot a lot of railroad chartering but no railroad building. Finally, The Thomaston and Barnesville Railroad was completed in 1857. A “petty line” built by a “struggling company,” the name was changed to The Upson County Railroad after the original company went bankrupt in 1860. The Central of Georgia acquired the 16-mile road in 1914. Frank Milburn’s neoclassical courthouse originally built in 1908 is still in use by Upson County. Photo by Penny Cliff. Courtesy of Thomaston-Upson Archives. A d ie l S he r wo o d notes in his 1827 Gazetteer of Georgia that all of the towns on the west side of the Upson County was one of those “up by its own boot straps” kind of places. Ambitious and enterprising in her beginnings, after the war the county would languish at the end of this remote spur line until 1891 when The Macon and Birmingham Railroad was completed from Macon to La Grange. Upson County’s first courthouse was completed in 1828, and the brick building was replaced by a larger, two-story, vernacular building in 1855. Sometime in the post war period an outrageous tower with a most bizarre, mansardlike roof was added. Only one photograph of this structure survives, and in it the courthouse is largely hidden by trees. Accordingly, it is hard to judge the building other than to say that enough is revealed in the photo to qualify the structure as truly unusual, if not comical. It is doubtless the creation of local builders blundering about in totally unfamiliar stylistic territory. It was replaced by Frank Pierce Milburn’s grand neoclassical celebration in 1908. Perhaps the most successful architect in the South in the first decades of the 20th century, Milburn was born in Bowling Green, Ky., in 1868. We know little of his early life except that he attended the University of Arkansas and began the practice of architecture in Louisville, Ky., in 1894. Milburn built a large practice in Charlotte, S.C., and later in Columbia, S.C. Upon accepting the office of architect for The Southern Railway, he moved to Washington, D.C., in 1902, but maintained his Columbia offices, operating as Milburn, Hester and Company. Between 1895 and his death in 1926, he designed more than 250 major structures in the South as well as numerous homes. Any survey of the surviving body of his work reveals Milburn to have been a man of his times. He was fluent in COURTHOUSE continued on page 40 SEPTEMBER 2008 www.accg.org 39 http://www.accg.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Georgia County Government - September 2008

Georgia County Government - September 2008 Contents President’s Message County Matters Cobb County: Quality of Life is Job No. 1 Innovative Transportation Financing in Georgia Drive Your Fleet into the Next Generation of Efficiency, Profits Spotlight: Georgia Technology Authority Media Productions GEMA News: Hurricane Season Could Cause Natural Gas Spike GDEcD News: Communities Receive Funds to Develop Tourism Assets Georgia’s Grand Old Courthouses: Upson County Extension News: Radon: Georgia’s Silent Danger Research Corner: Conserving Fuel Costs in Your County Staff News County Parade Index of Advertisers

Georgia County Government - September 2008

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