The first dairy cows arrived in Georgia with James Edward Oglethorpe, the founder of the colony, in the early 1700s. By the 1930s the dairy industry had gained success as a commercial enterprise in Georgia and has been a primary industry in the state ever since. In 2000 the value of the Georgia dairy industry to the state (including milk, cull cows, and bull calves) was $254 million. Early History Little is known about the earliest period of dairying in Georgia because acquiring milk was primarily a local enterprise, left to individual families.

African American traditional gospel singer and songwriter Dottie Peoples is one of Georgia’s most renowned figures in Christian music. Hailed as the “Songbird of the South” by the late radio host Esmond J. Patterson, Peoples has been compared to gospel and rhythm-and-blues artists Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, and Patti LaBelle. Peoples, one of ten children, was born circa 1950 in Dayton, Ohio, to Althea and Robert Milton. As a young girl she spent summers with her grandmother in Birmingham, Alabama.

Dublin, the seat of Laurens County in central Georgia, was incorporated by an act of the state legislature on December 9, 1812. Jonathan Sawyer, a merchant and the first postmaster of Dublin, named the town in honor of his wife’s ancestral home of Dublin, Ireland. The town nearly faded into obscurity, while the plantations across the northern half of the county thrived. The city was reincorporated in 1893 under its present system of government.

Ellaville, located fifteen miles north of Americus and fifty miles east of Columbus, is the county seat and the only incorporated town of Schley County. Ellaville was established along the south end of the community on what is now U.S. Highway 19. The town’s original name of Pondtown was changed to Ellaville in honor of Ella Burton, the daughter of the family on whose land the town was established. During its early years, the town, in addition to serving as the site of government for the county, supported the immediate commercial needs of the surrounding agricultural region.

Progressive architecture in Georgia between the late 1920s and the late 1950s developed in sequential and overlapping phases of modern design that historians have identified as art deco, modern classic, streamlined moderne, and Bauhaus modern or International style. Art Deco Art deco is the most ornamental and cosmetic of these design movements, involving the application of either monochromatic or polychromatic decorative patterns to building facades and a sharp-edged faceted profile to natural, zoomorphic, or human forms applied in relief to those building surfaces.