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THE HOUSTON HOME JOURNAL
DAVIS
From page 1A
drug store told him that the
man in the icehouse had gone to
dinner, and when my father
asked if he could just get the ice
and leave a note, he was told,
‘No, you’ll have to wait.’”
Apparently, Jerry A. Davis Sr.
didn’t think much of waiting
around. He went home and
started making plans to build
his own icehouse.
As for the dam, there’s appar
ently been some kind of dam in
that location on Mossy Creek
since the early 1840 s, and a tex
tile mill called Houston Factory
stood there a generation before
the Civil War. There was also a
sawmill there, and churches
sprang up to serve the commu
nity of farmers and mill work
ers.
“People used to build dams on
any creek they found to get
power to run mill wheels,”
Davis explains.
The 600 acres of land that
Davis’ grandfather bought from
the Cooper family included the
old Cooper home, which burned
and was replaced bv the home
that Davis has lived in all of his
life. The old Cooper house out
buildings, including the
kitchen, the smoke house and
the bath house still stand in the
back yard, mute reminders of a
day before indoor bathrooms,
and a time when homebuilders
frequently put the kitchen at a
distance from the house, with a
covered walkway.
There are older homes in the
area that were built by Davis’
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These frame outbuildings once served as a smokehouse and kitchen for a home originally built
near Houston Lake by early settlers. The original house burned, but the outbuildings remain.
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Houston County pioneers built their houses with materials they
could obtain. Glass was expensive and scarce. The windows here
are in the old Bryan house and were closed with wooden shutters.
ancestors. One, on Sandbed
Road, is near an old Bryan fam
ily cemetery. Another, which
Davis believes is the oldest
home in the county, is down the
abandoned, rutted and over
grown stagecoach road that
once led from Buzzard’s Roost
on the Ocumulgee River to
Perry.
Timeworn and empty for
many years, it was built of
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hand-hewn lumber by James A.
Bryan, the father of the coun
ty’s first known doctor. Jerry
Davis, who is Dr. Bryan’s great
grandson, has the leather sad
dlebags that the old man used to
carry his medicines.
That same Bryan was respon
sible for naming Kathleen.
“When the railroad was being
built,” Davis explains, “they
were worried about getting the
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This Bryan family home on Sandbed Road is believed to be the oldest continuously occupied home in
the county. The Bryan family, among the earliest pioneers to this area after the signing of the Indian
Springs Treaty in 1821, owned most of the land between Kathleen and Houston Lake.
land, but my great-grandfather
thought the railroad was a great
thing, and he offered the land
free if the railroad company
would build a settlement there
(for railroad workers) and a
depot.”
When the time came to name
the railroad stop, Bryan named
it after his daughter, Kathleen.
Davis knows some of his his
tory from family stories - but
some from his own experience.
He was an only son, growing up
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in a time when big farms were
self-sufficient, raising and
killing their own hogs, keeping
cows for milk, growing vegeta
bles for the family table along
with cotton and wheat for
income. As a boy, Jerry Davis
learned firsthand about work.
“My father made me do every
thing the hands did,” he
remembers. “He told me, ‘I
want you to know how to sym
pathize with the man that does
the job.’”
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He also remembers the lean
economy of those days, when
country stores, like the one his
family ran, gave farmers credit
against the time that they sold
their crops.
“We gave a lot of credit,” he
says, “for groceries, fertilizer,
feed, and sometimes a little
money on the side.”
As Jerry Davis tells it with a
grin, “We never lost a dime on a
man who was a bootlegger.”
Preachers, he says, were more
of a risk.
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Oxygen Concentrators
Portable Oxygen Systems
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