OHC NEWSLETTER
April May & June 2024
Waycross Sesquicentennial & Ware County Bicentennial
Remembering Dear Old Waresboro
Everyone comes from somewhere. We came from Waresboro.
Whether you hail from Manor, Bickley, Millwood, Telemore or even that place where the ways cross, Waresboro is your ancestral home.
Back when nary a car horn, train whistle, or airplane broke the piney silence from the Atlantic Ocean to Troupville, there was Waresboro, peopled by honest folk who came to make fresh beginnings on open land.
They came early, already here in 1824 when Ware County was carved out of Appling. And they set later generations a good example of hard work and vigilance, farming with a hoe in one hand and a musket in the other, always on the lookout for marauding Indians. Waresboro was located in a part of the Tallasee strip. This was Indian land, a vantage ground between the Indians and white settlers to the north, both sides contending for their rights. Later a penalty was meted out to the Indians for helping the British in the War of 1812 and the Indians were forced to relinquish their claims to the land and it was given to white settlers.
Many of these early settlers reached this area on a confluence of pioneer and Indian trails that ran through or near Waresboro. In an irony of history, it ap-pears that if Waycross was where the rails crossed, then Waresboro was where the coaches crossed, stagecoaches that is.
There was the early Barnard Trail, the old Columbus Road, then the Old Train Road, that passed from Thomas to Camden counties, passing through Ware at Waresboro, later to traverse the Waycross area on what we now know as Gilmore Street. The Kennard Trail was another, leading from Chattahoochee County in west Georgia through Ware to St. Mary’s. (continued)
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