THE WAR OF THE WORMS

The worms were coming! The worms were coming!

To some, the sight of a wriggling, writhing, wormy caterpillar is a wondrous event in nature's metamorphosis. To others, like the farmer, who sees his life-sustaining, family- feeding, bill-paying crops devoured in front of his very own eyes by legions of this loathsome larvae, it was an abhorrent abomination.

Farmers in Laurens County and southern Georgia had already heard of the voracious armyworm. They were used to dealing with all ranks of pesky, pernicious pests which threatened their crops. Dire forecasts of a weevil invasion had been heard for years.

But this time, in the summer of 1912, it was war.

That spring, W. D. Hunter, in charge of all field crop investigations in the South, warned of the dire consequences to come. Despite the fact that all evidence to that point indicated that the abnormally harsh temperatures of the previous winter had all but destroyed the moths, Hunter expected another invasion emerging, perhaps from South America.

The initial ground invasion was launched by the dreaded legion of the Spodoptera frugiperda. J.D. Williams, an enterprising, veteran farmer of Bulloch County, was hoping that 1912 was going to be another banner year for his cotton and corn crops. On a Sunday afternoon, in the last week of spring, Williams was out in his cornfield, some three miles from Metter, when he discovered the presence of thousands of creeping caterpillars crawling up and down his immature corn stalks.

"The field looks as if no corn had been planted there save for the young stalks lying on the ground," Williams reported on Tuesday. The worm, which cuts off the corn stalk at the bottom, destroyed nearly 50 acres of corn, which was rivaling cotton as the main cash crop.

Alarms were broadcast to the region's farmers. who immediately instituted frequent inspections of their plants. The invading army moved to the Ohoopee District of Toombs County, where they, with their mandibles mashing everything in sight, devoured the entire 20-acre cotton field of R.B. Cowart in a single, profit-erasing day.

Lawson E. Brown, state president of the Farmers Union, sent out the word far and wide of how to attack the writhing larvae. He told farmers to dig a row between the plants. When the worms crawled into the row, the farmer would drag a log down the row and bury them. Another method was to apply a mixture of Paris Green and flour and sift it onto the plants. More than 100,00o circulars were sent out to farmers around the state detailing how to deal with the invading larvae.

By the end of June, State Entomologist, E. Leo Worsham, began to report that Georgia farmers were winning the battle, although massive damages were inflicted in and around Thomasville, Tifton, Baxley and Hazlehurst. Worsham thought, at best, the cotton crop would be about two-thirds of the normal yield. By the end of June, reports of widespread devastation were coming out of Central Georgia in Bibb and Houston counties.

"Never before in the history of Georgia has a pest of this nature been checked so quickly," contended Worsham, who credited the farmers of the state and the work of his office in eradicating the enemy.

Worsham's back patting didn't bring a complete halt to the armyworm's offensive actions. Terrell County farmers suffered considerable damages. Ravenous armyworms destroyed Sumter County's entire and critically vital melon crop. One innocent lad in Putnam County brought a big jar full of the havoc-reeking creatures to a farmer, not even knowing of their dangerous proclivities.

By mid-July, the worms were infiltrating the growing fields of Baldwin, Greene and Putnam counties. Even the hay fields were not immune to attack. Congress was considering Federal aid to fight the onslaught.

As reports were published of attacks closer to Dublin, cautious Laurens County farmers banded together and did not wait on their national government to take action. More than 6,000 pounds of Paris Green was purchased at a cost of nearly $800.00. A committee was formed to sell the chemical mixture to local drug stores, which couldn't afford to carry that much poison in stock. Reports of wide spread infestation in the county were coming in during July.

On the negative side, Paris Green is a copper-based, highly toxic compound, first used to kill rats in the sewers of Paris, France. When used as a pesticide, Paris Green often killed the grass and trees where it was applied. So much for any organic corn eaters.

Congress appropriated a token amount of $25,000.00 and even sent a Federal expert, Dr. W.F. Webster, to the South to examine the problem.

But, W.W. Kicklighter, a farmer from Groveland, Georgia, wrote a bold letter in red ink to the United States Congress. In a simple-termed letter, Kicklighter respectfully asked that he be given a check for the $25,000.00 appropriated to get rid of the army worms.

He explained it to the politicians like this, "I had ten acres of corn and the armyworms had just started in." I drove my turkeys into the field and they ate the armyworms up in two days," wrote Kicklighter, who went on to proclaim that if he had not turned out his turkeys into his cornfield that he would have lost 500 bushels to the pesky varmints. Kicklighter's reward never came.

J.R. Dixon, of Parrish, Bulloch County, Georgia, too saw first hand the neutralizing force of his turkeys. He turned a flock of them into his field and at once they began to seek out and devour every wiggling worm they saw. Dixon scurried all around the county, borrowing turkeys to aid in his defense of his 20-acre corn field.

The idea of using turkeys to eat the caterpillars was nothing knew. Thomas Affleck had published the same and his very own theory in a widely published letter back in 1846.

At the 66th annual convention of the Georgia Agricultural Society, held on August 14 and 15 in Dublin, E.R. Worsham gave a belated speech on the eradication of the army worm, which was finally coming under the control of Georgia farmers. Worsham then began to supervise the state tax payer paid funding of thousands of pounds of powdered arsenate to finally eradicate the thoroughly dreaded Lepidoptera

The war of the worms was soon won by the farmers of the South. The same could not be said for the war against the boll weevil, which followed on a second front and almost singlehandedly, weather and economic conditions excepted, wiped out most of the cotton crop in Georgia in the mid 1910s, sending agricultural communities around the state into a Great Depression more than a dozen years before the Stock Market Crash in 1929.

THE NIGHT THE STARS FELL

THE NIGHT THE STARS FELL

On any given clear night you can see roughly 1500 stars with the naked eye.  On a cold November night in the year 1833, residents of the Eastern United States began to believe that the sky really was falling.   It was on that night, one hundred and seventy nine years ago tonight, when it seemed that at least thirty thousand and as many as many as two hundred thousand stars were falling every hour.  And, if the skies are clear this Saturday night you will get a chance to see just a small glimpse of what people all over the country saw on ‘the night the stars fell.

For billions of years, the comet Tempel-Tuttle has been orbiting the Sun.  Every thirty three years or so, the Earth passes through the densest section of the tail of Tempel-Tuttle.  Although the number of visible meteors currently is  substantially lower than in 1833,  the resulting meteor shower,  called the Leonids,  comes to a peak on November 17 of each year.

In the days leading up to November 13, 1833, the weather in Georgia had been somewhat mercurial.  On a rather warm Saturday and part of Sunday a steady rain fell.  After a Monday morning fog evaporated, the skies cleared.  As the sun began to set on Tuesday afternoon, temperatures began to plummet. Wednesday, like Tuesday, was a perfectly clear, crisp autumn day.   As the Sun set, a thin crescent moon hung low in the sky.  

Once the moon disappeared below the western horizon, the pitch black sky was speckled with its usual compliment of stars and planets.  All was normal or so it seemed.

Then about 9:00 that evening and continuing until the Sun came up the next morning, thousands and thousands of stars came screaming out of the calm, northeastern sky appearing to emanate out of the constellation of Leo, the Lion,  traveling at an estimated 156,000 miles per hour.

Those who believed in a higher being were sure that Judgment Day was at hand. Few, if any, people realized what was really happening. 

“The stars descended like snowfall to Earth,” an Augusta resident recalled.

“We were awaked by a neighbor, who had been aroused in a similar manner by one who supposed the World was coming to an end, as the stars were falling. The whole heavens were lighted by falling meteors, as thick and constant as the flakes which usher in a snow storm, ” a Georgia newspaper editor wrote. 

“Stars fell like snow flakes and fireballs darted back and forth in the heavens, like children at play,  making a grand and awe-inspiring display,” recalled  Rev. William Pate, of Turner County.

Settlers came from as far as 15 miles away to visit Rev. Pate’s home.  They stayed up all night singing hymns and praying as Reverend Pate read the scriptures.  Many confessed their most secret sins that remarkable night, truly fearing that the world was coming to an end. 

In an Alabama Heritage Magazine article in 2000, it was written that in a town in Georgia many profane people "were frightened to their knees,  dust-covered Bibles were opened and dice and cards were thrown to the flames.”

In Milledgeville,  the newspapers reported that hundreds and thousands of stars were shooting madly and vertically  from their spheres with several second-long trails of whitish light behind them.  Some thought that they must be fireworks instead of falling stars.  A few observers  swore that several of them had exploded.

A resident of Butler’s Island near Darien, Georgia wrote, “There were innumerable meteors in the skies, all apparently emanating from a focus directly overhead to every point of the compass, of various sizes and degrees of brilliancy, occasioned probably by their different distances.”  

One Morgan County farmer was transformed by the celestial phenomenon. As the shower intensified, the man ran out of his house, dressed only in his shirt and undergarments exclaiming, “The world is now actually coming to an end, for the stars are falling.”  His Negro servant ran after him as his master scrambled to take cover under the house.  

The farmers’ wife followed him outside and chastised her husband for his lack of courage.  The challenged the terrified farmer to come out and live or die with his family.  After he mustered the courage to come back outside, he gazed into the wondrous sight of thousands of burning meteors and vowed to himself and to God, “Well, this one thing I do know, escape or not - live long or die soon, I never will drink another drop of liquor.” 

Some Georgians thought the meteor shower had a more sinister political purpose than an astronomical phenomenon.  A  full scale political war between George M. Troup, of Laurens County, and John Clarke  had been raging for more than a dozen years.  Troup had been narrowly defeated by Clarke in two elections in the early 1820s.  Troup won a narrow victory of his own in 1823 and was narrowly reelected again in 1825 in the first popular vote  gubernatorial election in Georgia history.  

Following Clark’s death from yellow fever in October 1832, the struggle between the two rivals seemed to wane or simply shift to other members of the bitterly divided Democratic-Republican party.  

On Friday, November 8, five days before the meteor shower, Troup tendered his written resignation from the United States Senate from his Valdosta home in eastern Laurens County.  The first written accounts of the political icon’s leaving the Senate two years early circulating throughout the capital in Milledgeville on the 13th.  Although Troup maintained that his resignation was for purely personal reasons, some of his more ardent supporters thought that the evening’s spectacle was a sign of retribution if Clark’s followers regained political power in the state.

The longest lasting legacy of that starry, starry falling night was the beginning of the concentrated study of  meteors and the causes of meteors storms in particular.

So venture outside early this Sunday morning sit back and relax and turn your eyes upward and eastward and try to catch a glimpse of one of the grandest of nature’s fireworks, the Leonid Meteor Shower.  And, maybe one day, about 21 years or so from now, we all will witness the grand and glorious view of the night the stars fell.  

WHAT'S SHAKING?

 We Were!

Earthquakes are rare in Georgia, especially the ones which make our buildings and ourselves violently shake.  Two hundred years ago, earthquakes emanating from New Madrid, Missouri shocked the heartland of America, reaching all parts of Georgia. A century ago, even more earthquakes, although not as severe as the 1812 quakes, shook people all over the world.  In Georgia, the number of rattling quakes was at or near an all time yearly high.

It was a typical October day in Dublin.  Those around the city were coming down from the grand times at the 12th District Fair, which had ended only some ten days prior.  Several local people, who couldn't shake fair fever,  traveled by train to attend the ever popular Georgia State Fair in Macon.  

The Christians in the city had just held a mass meeting.  There was trouble in River City.   Crusades against vice were spreading throughout the country and it was on the third Monday of October, when a crowd of sinner stoppers crammed into the courthouse to hear speeches from J.E. Burch, C. Whitehurst and Rev. C.M. Crumbley on the evils of liquor and vice.

Judge Burch asked the congregation to speak out in favor of laws designed to punish the evil people.  The judge complained out loud that the children of the community were allowed to roam the streets without supervision. Whitehurst and Rev. Crumbley railed against the proliferation of the illegal sale of alcohol which was rampant in the community.    

It was a quiet, warm, rainy Tuesday night in Dublin, Georgia.  Record rainfalls were still soaking into the dry October soils around the county.  It seemed that C.C. Hooks, one of Dublin's finest young men from one of its finest family, had no cares in the world, nothing to torture his soul.  The popular livery man went to his room, carefully removed the pillows from his bed, laid down diagonally, his feet hanging off the edge of the bed, put his pistol to his head and fired a single, fatal shot.

Forty five minutes later, the minute hand on the courthouse clock was touching the three, while the hour hand was pointing just to the left of the eight.  

Then, all of a sudden and without a hint of any warning, the Earth began to tremble. The shaking then became a sharp, decided jolt. Throughout the city the report of a thunderous explosion, blasted everyone into a panic.  The fireman of the Dublin Fire Department, sleeping in their bunks in the City Hall, then on the courthouse square, awoke in a sheer panic.  They gathered their wits and then their gear before venturing outside, scanning the horizons in all directions to detect the presence of a plume of smoke arising into the misty evening.

Elsewhere in the City Hall, the Light and Water Committee of the City Council of Dublin was in session.  H.A. Knight had just been granted the approval of committee members John Kelley, Vivian L. Stanley and Attys P. Hilton for a sewer line to his home on Maiden Lane when the government building began to shake, shudder and tremble.  Kelley knew the building well.  As the preeminent contractor in Dublin, Kelley renovated Hilton's former hotel, which according to the custom of the day, was named for its owner, possibly making it the first Hilton Hotel in America.   With the council chamber moving in multiple directions,  the council sprinted outside toward the open area of the courthouse square.

All around the city, those who were alive back in August 1886, realized what was happening.  That's the day when a massive earthquake struck Charleston, South Carolina.  The shock waves spread to Dublin, igniting rampant trepidation throughout the burgeoning city.

It seems that Dublin and Macon were at the epicenter of the quake.  A writer for the Dublin Courier Dispatch, succinctly reported the event by stating, "One sharp quake was preceded by a sound similar to thunder.  It lasted several seconds and there was a slight shaking and rattling of houses and buildings but no damage occurred."

In the Third Street home of Rev. T.F. Callaway in Macon, Minnie Hammock and Ray Stahle, had just said their wedding vows when the window panes of the Callaway home shuddered and shook.  Cherished vases fell off the mantel, causing widespread panic among the less than amused wedding party, especially the frantic bride, who had to be revived. 

In those days, there were few if any seismographs in use around the country, none in Georgia.  The residents of Jeffersonville, somewhat equidistant between Dublin and Macon, reported no perceptible evidence of an earthquake.  In Milledgeville, some 47 crow fly miles away, there was a noticeable jarring. The Spartans of Hancock County, reported only a faint reverberation. 

  Residents of Augusta and Savannah failed to feel even the slightest earthly vibrations that evening, and certainly nothing like the heavy shocks that the citizens of the two ancient Georgia capitals felt back on the 12th of June.  That quake, or a series of quakes, shook the entire South, but were concentrated in eastern Georgia.  Those people in Dublin felt some of the shaking, which peaked around 4:30 in the morning.   It was the second one for the coastal capital, the first one coming on February 3, 1912. 

Post quake analysts searched their memories to compare the October 22nd quake to others in the Middle Georgia area.  Few remembered the 1884 Thursday and Saturday early morning quakes of March 20 and March 22, when a slight trembling of the Earth awoke the citizens of North Macon, Clinton and Dublin followed by a Sunday evening jolt.  The quake of the 22nd,   was reported as "very perceptible and the noise accompanying  it was  that of a fast departing train." 

Minor quakes along the Fall Line in Middle Georgia were not rare, occurring on a somewhat regular basis, especially in the last quarter of the 19th Century.

But, no one forgot the 31st day of August, 1886, when the entire Southeast was shaken by a major earthquake centered on Charleston, South Carolina.  That day is long gone from most of our minds now. But,  let us all remember there are times, just when you least expect them, when the Earth will begin to shake, rattle and roll beneath our feet.