By Robin Ford Wallace

The Dade County Historical Society hereby invites all interested parties for a jaunt down Memory Lane, with the caveat that physically it will be more a hike than a stroll. The society will host a field trip on Saturday, March 30, to the abandoned Cole City coke ovens on Sand Mountain.

Donna Street, the group’s vice president, advised prospective attendees to wear sturdy shoes. Getting to the coke ovens requires 45 minutes to an hour of moderately challenging walking. Hikers will gather at about 9 a.m. on the 30th at a site Ms. Street will announce later. She may be called for more information at (706) 657-7305 or (423) 227-6057, or emailed at donnamstreet@gmail.com.

The coke ovens at Cole City are a natural point of interest to the Historical Society in that they bespeak Dade County’s colorful past as a mining boom area, complete with saloons and saloon fights. “There were murders and there were trials and there were hangings,” said Ms. Street.

Ms. Street, who turns up in these pages quite often as a reliable source of local history, dug up records showing that Dade Coal Company, which operated the coke ovens, was commissioned in February 1873.  DCC and its sister companies nearby, Rising Fawn Iron Company and Walker Iron and Coal Company, were all controlled by the same man, Joseph E. Brown.

Brown, a former Georgia governor and senator, pioneered the exploitation of the Dade-Walker area for coal. “It wasn’t great coal,” said Ms. Street. “It wasn’t great for fires, but it did turn out to be great for making coke, which then turned into steel.”

And Brown could `put steel to good use: At the time he began his mining ventures in northwest Georgia, he was president of Western and Atlantic Railroad. 

“They were bringing coal from Pennsylvania,” said Ms. Street. “They could get it here for $8 a ton, but using the convict lease, he could get it where it needed to go for $1.60 a ton.”

The convict lease program was a system whereby private companies essentially purchased prisoners from the state for unpaid labor. By all accounts, it could reasonably be described as Slavery: The Sequel.

In the 1870s, this business of buying and selling people had been abolished not all that long ago, and as Brown and crew demonstrated, not all that completely. Brown, whose views on the institution may be intuited from the data set – his two terms as governor took Georgia through secession and the Civil War – used his political clout to contract with the state for as much free labor as his businesses could use.

 “In 1875, there 926 convicts at the Dade County Coal Company,” said Ms. Street. “There were 90 white males, 805 ‘colored’ males, 30 colored females and one white female – and one of them had two babies.” For that year, DCC paid Georgia $1,632.03 for these people, she said.

But the intent of the convict lease program, explained historical articles Ms. Street found on the subject, was not so much to make money for Georgia as to relieve the state of the expense of keeping them. In some cases, companies were not required to pay the state anything at all for the laborers, just to feed and house them.

Though not necessarily very well. One of Ms. Street’s articles mentioned rules that had been established for leasing the neo-slaves, including humane treatment and the services of a clergyman to aid in their moral rehabilitation. 

From all accounts, however, there was little or no state inspection or supervision, and critics at the time described conditions for the prisoners as “frightful” and “epitomized hell.” 

Contemporaneous investigations found inadequate diets for the prison labor, unclean drinking water, cruel working hours, and men kept in cages at night or chained up like dogs. 

To what extent these conditions existed at Dade County Coal, specifically, was unclear from the documentation.

For the Cole City site (note spelling – Ms. Street says the name comes from a Cole family, not the coalmining operation), Ms. Street found documentation mentioning 63 coke ovens, but said she understands there were over 300 at one point.

So what happened to that sizeable coal operation? Why do the coke ovens now molder abandoned deep in the woods? “They stopped because the convict lease system in Georgia stopped,” said Ms. Street. “The convict lease system was stopped in 1908 by a legislative act.”     

Brown, meanwhile, had died in 1893. Without him, and without the luxury of unpaid labor, the coal operation in Dade dwindled and died. The land the ovens sit on is now in the hands of three separate property owners, with whom the Dade Historical Society arranged permission for the March 30 outing. 

Whether or not you’re up for the hike, Ms. Streets reminds you that the Historical Society welcomes public attendance at its bimonthly meetings, which almost always include entertaining programs. You can become a member for $10.  Meetings are at 3 p.m. in the Dade County Library on the first Sunday of every other month. The last meeting was this past Sunday, so the next is on May 5.