『Destination: Four Georgians Who Shaped America』のカバーアート

Destination: Four Georgians Who Shaped America

Destination: Four Georgians Who Shaped America

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Destination: Four Georgians Who Shaped America Hello, hello, hello, and welcome aboard Travel with Anita and Friends. Now, Georgia has always produced more than its share of remarkable people, men and women whose ideas, courage, and craftsmanship reach far beyond our state lines and help shape the story of our entire country. We’re going to meet four of them: an industrialist who built a town from the ground up, a woman who started a movement that still shapes girls’ lives today, and a master bridge builder who connected two states with his own hands, and a woman who broke barriers as a teacher, a nurse, and author decades ahead of her time. Now, I’m talking about some really pretty fantastic people, some that you may know very well and others that may be new to you. Henry Ford, of course, we know him from Ford Motor Company. Juliette Gordon Low of the Girl Scouts. Horace King, who built a bridge, and Susie King Taylor, the educator who worked through the Civil War to educate people in reading and writing. Now, four Georgians, four extraordinary stories that we’ll share today. So I’m ready to really get into it now, and I’d like to start with the man that I like to say is the man who built a hill. I’m talking about Henry Ford’s Georgia legacy along the Coastal Bryan Heritage Trail. Some of us may have actually driven through Richmond Hill. It’s just a little south of Savannah in a town that is so charming you’d swear it was designed that way on purpose. And, well, it kinda was. We’re talking about Richmond Hill, Georgia, that is a place that is right off of Highway 17 or Interstate 95. And you may not realize that you just passed through a town that is one of the most famous men in America, in American history, he- that he basically built with his own two hands. Now, Henry Ford, and that is of course the Henry Ford, the Model T Henry Ford of the Ford Company. Well, that assembly line, the man who put America on wheels, and for over 20 years, this stretch of Georgia coast was where he came to slow down. So let’s back up a little because to understand why Henry Ford ended up here, you have to understand who he really was before he even set foot in Georgia. Now, back in 1914, Ford did something that shocked the entire country. He doubled his factory workers’ pay practically overnight to $5 a day. [laughs] That doesn’t seem like much now, but at that time, that was really big money, and newspapers all over the world ran the story. Nobody had ever seen an industrialist share that kind of money with the people actually building his products. Well, now, let’s be honest, though, because it wasn’t quite as simple as it sounds. It came with strings attached. Ford had inspectors checking up on workers and home lives, expecting them to save money, stay sober, keep things tidy. [laughs] Wow, that’s quite an involvement there, and people didn’t love that part. You can understand why. But at the heart of it, Ford believed something a lot of wealthy men of his era didn’t, that if you take care of the people around you, everybody does better. The company does better. The community does better. The individual people do better. So keep that in mind because that same instinct, that’s, that’s exactly what he brought with him to Georgia. And by the early 1920s, Henry and his wife, Clara, were spending their winters down in Fort Myers, Florida. But Florida was growing. It was growing fast, and the Fords started feeling really a little crowded. So what did Henry do? Well, what Henry always did. He asked someone he trusted. His good friend, the naturalist John Burroughs, told him about a quiet stretch of the Georgia coast, a little place called Way Station. And Henry and Clara came to take a look, and from what history books tell us, it was Clara who really fell the hardest for that particular area. She loved the Spanish moss hanging off of those big live oak trees and the birds everywhere you looked, and that slow, easy, kind of low country charm that you get in that area. Of course, Henry saw something a little different. He saw opportunity, and before they even left Savannah, he told his secretary he… to start negotiating right away. And that was it. By March of 1925, Henry Ford owned his first 100 acres in Way Station. Over the next several years, Ford just kept buying. Old rice plantations, overgrown farmlands, even the abandoned grounds of historic Fort McAllister. And by the time he was done, Henry Ford owned somewhere around 85,000 acres. Yep, you heard me right, 85,000. Now, that’s 120 square miles. That’s a lot of land, and for those of you who are keeping track at home, that’s actually larger than some countries. That’s pretty big. Henry Ford didn’t buy all of that land just to sit on it and enjoy the view. Way Station at that time was one of the poorest communities on the whole Georgia coast, and Ford, true to that same instinct that gave us the $5-a-day pay, ...
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