Sensitive Brier
August 2016
What's a Lumpkin? A Bird? A Rare Plant? Or just some forgotten town?
Natural Wanderings: Photo diaries about wildflowers and trees, birds and bugs, and maybe some critters as I wander and learn about the natural beauty of our world.
Well it's Lumpkin - another rural community in southwest Georgia passed by when the big 4-lane divided highway was built. That's a good thing most likely altho downtown has lots of vacant stores around the courthouse square. For me Lumpkin is a stop on the drive up US 27 starting from my home a dozen miles south of the Georgia border.
My traditional rest stop, after 3 hours and 130 miles, is just past Lumpkin at a small cutoff that probably was used as a staging area when the highway was built. It's usually @9 or 10 so I get a second breakfast and take a walk-around. There's always wildflowers along the edges of the dirt road and fields so I like to check that out and compare to home. It's a good place to prep before the intensity of interstate driving -- I-185 in Columbus, GA to I-85 and even sometimes, if it's not a workday and the weather is perfect and it's Sunday morning and there’s no construction (yeah un-huh, sure) I'll go right thru Atlanta.
I've driven US 27 so many times, each town and crossroad and sign and farm is embedded in my head. As a mnemonic I learned ABC BBC LLC ... C!
Attapulgus - Bainbridge - Colquitt
Blakely - Bluffton - Cuthbert
Lumpkin - Louvale - Cusseta ... Columbus!
Wiki has a page of Lumpkin history. Briefly: Native American peoples graced the land for generations but were driven off by European settlers who divided up the land quickly and brought in slaves and there ya go... Where the land eventually played out, agriculture in the hilly areas became what it is today, miles of silviculture. Flatter land with better soil is planted with crops like cotton, peanuts, hay and pasture. Speaking of, near Bluffton is White Oak Pastures - grass-fed beef, free-range chickens, you can see it all from the road and purchase at the store. One time I drove by, the grass was so tall it was brushing the cows bellies and hiding the calves.
Saturday Afternoon - maybe I can listen to that tune from the Jefferson Airplane while y'all jump in with comments and observations of wherever you’ve been wandering. And what's a mess of wildflowers without a DYC?
All photos taken with iPhone 5SE using Camera app at the Lumpkin rest stop on August 9th.
* * * * * * * *
"Spotlight on Green News & Views" is posted every Saturday at 1:00 pm Pacific Time and Wednesday at 3:30 on the Daily Kos front page. It's a great way to catch up on diaries you might have missed. Be sure to recommend and support. It's not all bad news...