Dirt Road Treasures and the Sylvania Historic Welcome Center
Plus, Peanut State attractions and a Lake Chatuge vista
This week, we’re traveling down a dirt road lined with relics of the past. We’ll drive by a country store where folks once returned Coke bottles for a nickel, pass a gabled tenant home with a wide front porch, and turn onto a red clay driveway that leads to an old homeplace.
There aren’t many dirt roads left. Some are now highways that cross state lines. Below, you’ll read about the nation’s oldest welcome center, located on the Georgia-South Carolina state line. Then we take you on a quick tour of some of the Peanut State’s famous attractions.
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Dirt Road Museum
By Tom Poland
To see a dirt lane gracefully curving out of sight is to see poetry. Someday, though, the South will be down to its last dirt road. Just as gas pump globes left us, that road will surely vanish. Before it does, I hope a visionary will turn it into a museum of an era we’ll never see again.
We’ll christen it Memory Lane. At its far end must be a crumbling farm. Collectors of old wood and longleaf pine have stripped some barns bare. Trees obscure the farmstead, and barbed wire sags from old cedar posts.
Out pasture way an old truck’s gas tank, cut in half, gives whiteface cattle two water troughs. That blue farm pond with its green veneer of grass? In it swim bluegills, big mouth bass, and shellcrackers. That statue of a boy with a cane pole over his shoulder? Look closely. It’s not Opie Taylor. It’s just a country boy and that pail he’s holding is full of red wrigglers.
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The Sylvania Historic Welcome Center
Over time, many dirt roads are paved and turned into highways. Where those highways cross state lines, you’ll often find a welcome center.
The Sylvania Historic Welcome Center—Georgia’s first and the nation’s oldest operating state visitor center—was dedicated on January 20, 1962. Designed by Edwin C. Eckles in midcentury modern style with Etowah pink marble and pecan wood, it sits on 6 acres at U.S. Highway 301 near the South Carolina border and encloses a picnic park with ten tables and grills.
Governor Ernest Vandiver is credited with initiating and building the welcome center as a key part of his mission to boost tourism and economic development by showcasing Georgia’s appeal to visitors entering from South Carolina. Have you been there? If not, it’s worth a stop because it’s the only visitor center to still offer travelers free Coca-Cola and Georgia peanuts.
