Dodge Troubles Excerpt at www.widowofsighingpines.biz
Dodge Troubles Excerpt

The Old House at Normandale

Standing on a knoll, maybe a hundred feet from the busy Highway 341 that stretches between the towns of Eastman and McRae, the large, two-story house is a relic of the past, really all that is left of the once-thriving town of Normandale in Dodge County, Georgia. Now called Suomi, with a small sign which admits to being the home of fifty-one people, Normandale was once a thriving lumber mill town of nearly six hundred people during the late 1800s.

Like a cyclone, Northern capitalists such as William E. Dodge of New York came in 1868 and transformed the pine-laden forests which towered on both sides of wagon paths -former Indian trails - into a land of stumps, as far as the eye could see. For forty years, the lumberman’s axe resounded throughout 500 square miles of longleaf yellow pine, felling the giant virgin trees which had grown untouched for hundreds of years.

If the old executive mansion at Normandale could talk, what a story it could tell...about the rapid building of the nearby sawmill at Normandale, about the new railroad near the sawmill, about the turbulence of the times and the land war, and about the man, John C. Forsyth, chief agent of William E. Dodge, who lived at Normandale and who was murdered at Normandale in 1890 by angry “squatters.” Local historians claim that the Forsyth home burned during the early 1900s, but it was once situated near the old executive house which still stands at Suomi. A newspaper article of the times states that Norman W. Dodge owned a home at Normandale, so it is possible that the old house which still stands was once the home of Norman W. Dodge. An 1886 article mentions plans for a “magnificent residence” at Normandale for the general agent, A. N. Sexton. The same article also mentions a residence for “Mr. W. Knox, the company’s efficient bookkeeper” as “nearing completion.” Several newspaper articles state that J. B. Knox, an agent of the Dodges, owned one of the executive houses at Normandale, so the old house was probably his. The house is presently owned by Mrs. Thomas S. (Joyce) Bland of Jay Bird Springs in Dodge County.