Ed Jackson and Charles Pou

The University of Georgia

September 16

1831 Minister and educator Morgan Callaway was born in Washington, Georgia. While at the University of Georgia he joined the Baptist Church after attending a revival, though he later became a Methodist. He graduated in 1849 and then read law and was admitted to the bar in Augusta. Because of his father's opposition to a career in law, Callaway decided to be an educator. In November 1860, he became president of the Methodist Church's Andrew Female College in Cuthbert. In 1862, he resigned that post to join the Confederate Army.

After the war, Callaway served as a Methodist minister in Washington, Georgia, and then as president of La Grange Female College. In 1872, he joined the faculty of Emory College in Oxford, first teaching Latin and then English. In 1882, Georgia Methodists--both black and white--launched a campaign to create Paine Institute in Augusta for training black youth to become leaders in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. Callaway was named president of the new school. However, before leaving Emory College, he preached a sermon in Oxford in which he indicated that he felt he had been called by God to work for the new black school. However, the sermon subsequently was printed and led to so much controversy that he resigned the presidency of the new school and returned to Emory College. Callaway served as Emory vice president until his death in 1899.

1866 Women's religious leader Carrie Parks Johnson was born in Georgia. After graduating from LaGrange Female College in 1883, she married a Methodist preacher. In 1910, she became active in the Methodist Church as a founding member of the Women's Missionary Council (WMC), chaired its Laity Committee, and served as a member of the Methodist General Board of Missions. Johnson promoted laity rights for women and was elected a delegate to the Methodist Church's 1922 general conference. In 1920, she chaired the WMC's Commission on Race Relations. Later that year, she began working with black women to promote interracial cooperation--a principle she was committed to until her death in 1929.

1933 Reporting on New Deal initiatives to end the Depression, newspapers announced that Georgia would be receiving 70 million dollars in federal funds to build roads and public projects in attempts to stimulate business recovery and ease unemployment.

1996 Atlanta Braves ace pitcher Greg Maddux established a Major League record by winning his 17th consecutive game on the road.

2006 R.E.M., Gregg Allman, Dallas Austin, Jermaine Dupri, and Felice Bryant were inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame.

2009 A series of storms continued passing through west and north Georgia, which would eventually drop over ten inches of rain (significantly more in some areas) over much of the state. The result was severe flooding in numerous Georgia counties, some even closing interstate highways. Death tolls from the flooding would reach at least nine people.

Georgia cities and towns incorporated by acts approved on Sept. 16:

1870 Clarkesville (Habersham County) and Euharlee (Bartow County)

1891 Hapeville (Fulton County)

In Their Own Words on This Day. . .

1738 In Savannah, Trustees' secretary William Stephens bemoaned the lack of good hired help available in Georgia:

"Saturday. Every one of my Servants now were sick, and incapable of Work; and what was worse, when well were grown so false and lazy, through the poisonous Influence of other idle Rascals, who made it great Part of their Business to seduce and debauch all they could, that for some Months past their Labour did not pay for keeping them. . . . I knew not what remedy to find, other than to dispose of two or three of the worst, if I could get any proper Master to take them off my Hands when well, and try to get others who be of some Use to me; otherwise all must go to Ruin. . . I was sure to pay severely, for our common labouring People, who never cared to work as long as they had Money or Credit to live in Excess; when they were wanted for Hire, required such wages as is hardly to be believed. . . ."

Source: William Stephens, A Journal of the Proceeding in Georgia ([no city cited]: Readex Microprint Corporation, 1966), Vol. I, pp. 287-288.

1739 Georgia colonist Patrick Mackay accompanied James Oglethorpe on his important visit to the Creek Nation. On this day, after a four-day rest at Fort Augusta, Mackay recorded in his journal of their departure:

"September 16th the General set out from Fort Augusta and about seven or eight miles from thence we stopped at a fort belonging to Carolina, which saluted the General with fifteen guns. The General stayed and dined there. This fort is situate[d] on a hill and commands two rivers. Near the fort are about one hundred houses."

Source: Ed Cashin, Setting Out to Begin a New World: Colonial Georgia (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1995), p. 83.

1775 Georgia royal governor James Wright wrote once again to Lord Dartmouth, British secretary of state for the colonies, about the success of the independence movement in Georgia and the other American colonies.

"My Lord: The Liberty People are still going on in the same way. I am informed that officers have been chosen by every company of militia in the province. Some who had commissions have been elected, and many new ones chosen, so that these people having signed the Association will not be considered by the Provincial Congress and the other bodies as under their authority and direction and not the King's or mine. In short, My Lord, the whole executive power is assumed by them, and the King's Government remains little else than nominally so. Your Lordship sees the great and criminal strides they are making in subversion of law and the King's government and establishing one of their own, and this new government seems to me to be on the following plan: The Provincial Congress, a kind of legislature in the respective provinces, subjects to the control and direction of the Continental Congress, which is the supreme legislature and governing power over the whole continent. The Council of Safety seems to be the executive branch in each colony, subject to the Provincial Congress, and the general and parochial committees dispense law and exercise the powers of the several courts, just as it seems right in their own eyes."

Source: Mills Lane (ed.), Georgia: History written by Those who lived It (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1995), p. 39.

1817 In an editorial calling for the gradual reduction of Georgia's slave population to be replaced by German workers, the Georgia Journal further argued against the presence of free blacks in Georgia:

"Slavery is a most intolerable curse, and we should not care how soon it was abolished, could it be done consistently, with our safety; but we are decidedly opposed to partial emancipation -- it should be no longer tolerated among us, unless we are prepared to share the tragic fate of St. Domingo; cruel as such conduct may appear, self-preservation sternly admonishes us to send from the country, without delay, every free person of color -- 'peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must.'"

Source: Mary Young, "Racism in Red and Black: Indians and Other Free People of Color in Georgia Law, Politics, and Removal Policy," 73 Georgia Historical Quality (Fall 1989), p. 498.