Features
From mountains to an old home and rolling tides
By Mark Pace
Calendared decades, distances and humankind have failed to deny many Georgians the thrill and love they have for their state’s broad attractions. Such are the rough and high mountain tops in North Georgia to the wave-washed and soft sands of the seashores, breezes on wind-blown greenery of the marsh grasses and ocean depths of the unknown off southeast Georgia’s coastlines.
Sidney Lanier, late in the 1870s, penned his ever-popular poem, “The Marshes of Glynn,” covering the ocean’s territory down near the Brunswick and Glynn County area. But there is much more territory and published accounts of that stretch of southeast Georgia’s coastline that laps up to the watery shore’s white sands and roll again, this time, returning as outgoing waves into their salty water homeland of ocean and earth.
Coastal scenes have been filmed and preserved on celluloid and memories written and recorded in countless numbers of publications. Numbered among the latter is a book, “Tidewater Family,” by a Daltonian, Betty Ann Durant (Mrs. James) Chamblee, who subtitled it, “The Durant Family — Growing Up in Valona, Georgia.”
Immediately, she describes the small community, and the reader has no problem with a mental picture of her homeland, the marshes, the home, the family and its members and descriptive historical involvement in their coastal community activities.
So, where is the community Valona? Mrs. Chamblee put you there in the opening remarks of her book, with this: “Valona is a magical place in tiny fishing community in McIntosh County on the coast of Georgia. Between Valona and the Atlantic Ocean lies Shellbluff Creek, a sea of marsh grass, the Intercoastal Waterway and Sapelo Island.”
Continuing, she wrote: “Valona got its name from a sailing vessel from Europe, probably Italy. Valona was originally Shellbluff, but when a post office was applied for, there was already a Shellbluff, Ga., so a new name was needed. Someone had noticed one of the timber ships that was anchored in Sapelo Sound with the name Valona, and chose that name for the post office.”
The family’s background of residency there was in 1736, a hundred years before there was our Cross Plains in 1837 and 10 years later, in 1847, naming of this community as Dalton.
Although the Durant family, consisting of Betty Ann, then 2 years of age, didn’t move to Valona until 1936, the Durant ancestors have been in the county since Oglethorpe’s time.
“Grandmother Durant’s McIntosh ancestors arrived from Inverness, Scotland, aboard the sailing ship Prince of Wales in 1736. The Durants have been in the county since the early 1800s,” Betty Ann stated in her book.
From her’s and Jim’s home in the mountainous area surrounding Dalton, Betty Ann has carefully and thoroughly recorded, in the only book she has written, details of shoreline life in the family’s Tidewater Home. Included was the evening she and her husband, James were there, attending an evening dinner in the old homeplace when “a big wet, muddy raccoon came running through the pet door and ran to one of the food tables.”
Reaction: It happened to be a pet raccoon of Marianna Hagan and her husband, Red, a couple who had not seen their missing pet raccoon Rosie for some time. They were glad to see the animal, and it was held in Red’s lap throughout the dinner hour, brushing Red’s face with a glad “home again,” tongue across Red’s face.
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As the Town Crier walks the streets calling out the news of the week once again, he finds himself announcing the snow. We’ve had bigger snows, as anyone that lived through the Blizzard of ’93 will recall. Humvees couldn’t get through the streets. A week after the snow fell it was announced on the national news that the last places Fed Ex still couldn’t get into were Chattanooga and Dalton. But it has been years since we’ve had so many different snow days over a winter. And winter isn’t over yet.
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This time of year, in the middle of the dead of winter, I would go with my grandmother out the screen door of the back porch and around the back of the house to a wooden door that opened to a space underneath. It wasn’t a basement, but just an area with a dirt floor and room enough to stand up in. The dirt on the floor was like dust since it never rained under there. Along one wall of this cool, dark, dry space was a series of broad shelves. From the shelves she would shop, just as if she were walking down the aisle of a grocery store. She would make two or three selections from the shelves and then we would go back through the cold afternoon, closing the wooden door behind us, and make our way back into the house. The back porch door opened into kitchen. She would stop there and I would go on into the living room to watch the black and white television or play with toys. Within half an hour the house would fill with the smell of good things cooking for supper that night. Good, fresh things. Things that smelled of half a year ago. For you see, the items on that shelf in the dark, under the floor, were jars. And in those jars were summer.
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