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What happened between 1916 and 1982 that a bustling farm community represented by dozens of children should dwindle to two elderly members? The answer can be found in another headline, “Tattnall Gets The New Prison,” which I discovered in the July 23, 1931, issue of the Tattnall Journal. The state had decided to buy 6,200 acres in the Cedarhaw District to create a new prison farm since conditions at Milledgeville had become crowded. The land was located “six miles from the paved road between Lyons and Douglas” and would cost $20 an acre. This prison farm (now Rogers State Prison) and later Georgia State Prison gobbled up ten thousand acres and emptied out the countryside of Cedarhaw, in the process displacing a community of hard-working, fun-loving yeomen – farmers, sharecroppers, tenants, schoolchildren, churchgoers. What was left was one lone church. The poet Linda Hogan once wrote, “I was only one of the fallen, in a lineage of fallen worlds and people.” Cedarhaw was a fallen world. ABOVE Harry Moses offered a wealth of construction knowledge for the project, and Carroll Williams, current owner of Harry Moses Construction, provided labor for the new roof. 76 Toombs County Magazine


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