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What is a Community? What is a Community?Recently, I have been exchanging emails with a lady named Claire Jordan and learning a little about the community in southern Georgia where her family comes from, a very small place known as Headlight, Georgia. Headlight is on very few roadmaps: located northwest of Fargo, it sits in a spot of swamp pretty much all to its proverbial lonesome. The name comes from the fact that apparently at Headlight, one can see the headlights of approaching trains through the woods as a railroad track runs through the area and is probably one reason why a community sprung up where it did. I first heard of Headlight when I bought a United States Geological Survey topographical map of this region of Georgia entitled by the very same name. The USGS names its topo maps after the largest or best known community covered by said map, and there is more or less nothing else out there near Headlight so it apparently got this honor. However, as I stated, you won't find Headlight even listed on most road maps, in good part because no major highways pass very close to it. Headlight intrigued me though due to its remote location and I was determined to learn more about it so I started asking friends with family in Clinch, Ware, and Echols counties about Headlight . . . asking people I knew in places like Blackshear and Nahunta . . . trying to learn whether people really did live way out there in the swamp.
Few of my friends from the region could offer any real light on Headlight so I turned to Internet forums, which brought me to talking with Ms. Jordan. She, and a few other kind souls, were able to provide that yes, there has been a small community at Headlight for a number of years, more or less just a number of families living in the area. Thus Headlight is not what I would call a town, no post office, no general store probably . . . I cannot even say what exactly is located there now, if much of anything. Perhaps it's just a few decaying buildings, someone's old barn, or perhaps there are still people of those same families out there. In any case, for the South, this is about as remote as remote gets, excepting places like West Texas. This is a dense, swampy, wooded, land contrasted with its fertile botanical growth by the sparse human population found in the region. Still, some brave souls have made a life in places like this: they have carved out of hard-scramble land the ability to survive. I admire that a lot and I admire the legacy that such a life provides. It is a legacy of hard work and effort, something that I feel is often missing from today's culture and today's values. Claire Jordan was able to share some family photos that gave an idea about life in Headlight. It was a life that, in these snapshots from bygone days, illustrated a piece of life in the history of the American South. Farming was the main source of income, if you could call it income: like many places, most families simply grew and raised what they needed for life, and perhaps traded what they had for those things they did not. They stand proud before an old car that would have been new at the time in one photo. These folks tended this land and added a human presence and human history to it. When you had land, you had something: you might stay just because you had land in that place and that was at least a start, at least something that you could in literal and more metaphoric terms alike build a future upon. This was not somewhere that would grow into an expansive town, no, but it would be somewhere a family could build their own legacy. Beyond the history of Headlight though, an immediate question that is begged by considering such places is the question of what, exactly, constitutes a community? Also, there is the question of where will ultra-small communities like this be in a few years? Will we lose all those communities that never really became towns but were just a cluster of dwellings and a sense of family? Towns, hamlets, communities . . . whatever you wish to call a spot where a number of folks live, these have been important in history when it was less possible to travel great distances quickly and therefore you were somewhat installed where you lived. You probably worked there or nearby and it was handy to have your church, your general store, perhaps your bank and a doctor and dentist all nearby. Nowadays, I see a lot of small communities in northern Florida and southern Georgia either grow stale with empty streets and empty stores or I see them become absorbed into larger cities or else serve as bedroom communities for the same. In example, High Springs here in Alachua County serves a dual role as a place where a number of people who work in Gainesville (the nearest city) live and also as a tourist destination as there are a number of state parks and other outdoors attractions nearby. High Springs is much the model of the 21st century small town: ample growth but low crime and few of the problems germane to larger communities. However, not all towns have the level of economic growth as High Springs: to Gainesville's south-west we have Williston which could be a very nice small town but you go downtown only to be greeted by a number of vacant storefonts. Such is not the best marker of economic growth, to say the least. In some ways, a town like Williston is more akin to Headlight than it might care to admit: while once a decent-sized town, now its residents probably travel out of town (to Gainesville you can assume) for most goods and services. Gas stations and places to eat are found in Williston and antique stores have been popular but beyond that, you go elsewhere now for clothing, for furnishings . . . such has been the trajectory really since the rise of the mall and department stores. Now, downtown Williston has store-front churches and a Latin grocery store . . . a couple antique stores appear to have closed up shop. The present economy may make it even tougher for those who deal in non-essentials. The size of a town though is not always indicative of the depth or scope of its history nor its desire to retain the same: while the Putnam County community of Interlachen is tiny compared to Gainesville, it nonetheless has a dedicated and active historical society. Oftentimes, a sense of history is in fact more acute in smaller communities as they foster a sense of both place and community. In our contemporary media-infused culture, our sense of gravitas of place is oft hampered by external influences over those that are immediate to where we live. If living in any city means eating at the same places, shopping at the same places, doing the same daily things and watching the same television shows as anywhere else in the nation, what of the specifics of life in the actual place at hand? As our experience becomes more homogenous, our actual locality may seem to matter less but something I have noticed as a journalist and a student of architectural history alike is that more and more people are becoming interested in the physical places they live and the history of such places. It's a means of becoming more in touch with who we are and where we come from, I suppose. In talking with Mary Lou Dawson of the Historical Society of Interlachen, I learned that a variety of forces have delayed important historical work there mainly because a lot of people fear that historical preservation will present roadblocks for further business development. That is really sad because really, by retaining what makes a town unique we better further the image of that community whereas if we tear down or simply neglect all historic buildings and the general evolved landscape of the town, it will over time start looking like Any Street USA instead of Mainstreet USA. The things which make a community unique should be the more valued aspects for business to build a greater economy in that location instead of trying to make everything look the same as anywhere else.
Tomorrow I will be in DeLand, a city noted for its continued efforts to retain the original charm of its small-town downtown feeling. I was in Waldo on my way back from Jacksonville a week ago and noticed there that while buildings sit boarded-up and vacant, others, such as an old bank building, have found new life in new applications. In the case of the bank building in Waldo, Roland Wise, a local man who made his career in California and then recently returned back home, has restored the building and converted it to a novel use as a coffee shop. In doing so, Mr. Wise has created a local business that not only contributes to the economy but does so in a personal way. Had, in example, a Starbucks gone in instead in Waldo, we would still be able to get a good cup of coffee there but we would also find a very typical atmosphere and experience that we could find in any city across the nation. Mr. Wise instead brings us with his "30124" (named after local highways) Coffee House a center of community. Wise has displayed his own artwork and that of other artists he knows from his time in California in the coffee house and has live music on certain nights. He plans to expand his enterprises here and I am going to interview him in a future edition of this paper and detail more about the story of his bank building turned coffee house. His example is one that other small communities could learn from: even if you have a small town, you can still bring in local businesses and have something unique beyond the Wendy's and chain gas stations that dot the landscape. With so-called communities such as Myspace and Facebook on the Internet, it is tempting for people of my generation to overlook real-life communities when they are rural, they are small, and perhaps they do not offer anything especially amazing or exciting on the surface. Digging deeper though, we find such places to be truly rich. When I first started asking about Headlight, all I had to go on was a topographic map and yet my inquiry brought me to further communications with people who were able to tell me about the hard yet worthy lives of those who lived in this small place. A community is where we live, before and beyond whatever else a community can be: it is the richness and the locus of our lives and those of people around us and thereby it is something that connects us with others. Moreover, it connects us with the land itself. A song I really like by the band Morcheeba contains the lyric "I've gained the world, but lost my soul" and perhaps that's a fate that we trade without even thinking about it when we try to become part of something beyond our immediate community at the sake of pushing away that local world. It doesn't have to be that way though, though, we can approach the future and better our lives while also retaining our history. Thanks to Claire Jordan for providing the historical photo of the Griffis family in Headlight, Georgia.
MIKE WALKER is a writer based in Gainesville, Florida. He covers history, ecology and related topics for this and other regional and national news media. He may be reached via email at: cloudrace@prontomail.com |
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