(Editor’s Note: A member of a longtime Gwinnett family is moving to Birmingham, Ala., his wife’s hometown. He is the author of Snellville’s first complete history book, entitled “200 Years of Snellville History.” He plans to return to Gwinnett…eventually. Here he remembers Gwinnett’s days of yore.—eeb)
By Jim Cofer
SNELLVILLE, Ga. | As I leave Gwinnett for a new life, I look back on the county where my family has been for 196 years and am wide-eyed with amazement at the changes I have seen and heard my forefathers describe. Much of the change has been for the good, but some, not so much so.
Jim and Joanne Cofer
I personally remember dirt roads, riding granddad’s plowstock behind a mule, picking cotton, killing hogs and curing the meat, milking cows, gathering eggs, drawing well water, visiting the outhouse, running the rabbit box trail, observing a KKK rally, and getting paddled in school.
Some of the change has been good, traffic excluded, especially in the options for health care.
Gone are the days of Dr. Ezzard’s little round pillboxes and Dr. Willis McCurdy bending you over his desk and jamming a penicillin shot into your rump, no matter what the ailment. We had no dentists until the Mazzawi family came to town in 1969. Our hospitals now rival any facility in the Southeast.
My grandparents got what little education they had from the numerous one-room private schools that dotted the county. My parents rode buses to the Snellville Consolidated School (1922-1956) that served as a community center (but still had outhouses). My generation benefitted from the opening of four modern schools in Lawrenceville, Norcross, Snellville, and Suwanee in 1957 (Central, West, South and North Gwinnett high schools.) We gained access to chemistry labs, modern cafeterias, large gymnasiums, and lighted football stadiums, instead of cow pastures. Gwinnett now has 165 state-of-the-art schools in its system, thanks to the leadership and vision of former Superintendent Alvin Wilbanks. Enough said about that.
I grew up in a Gwinnett where violent crime was not a worry. Sure, a county commissioner would take a kickback from the price of a new bulldozer, camping gypsies would pilfer your tool shed, a bootlegging sheriff was sent to prison, and even I snitched a watermelon or two from a neighbor’s patch.
But then on April 17, 1964, we were horrified when three Gwinnett County policemen happened on to a car stripping gang off Beaver Ruin Road and were cuffed together and murdered with their own pistols. Now, we have become numb to daily reports of gang initiation killings, human trafficking, road rage, random shootings, and widespread use of powerful drugs. Big city crime has come to Gwinnett.
Gwinnett in the 1950s had small incorporated towns, with each supplying their own water from city wells, police with a judge and maybe a jail, and a volunteer fire department. Later came garbage pickup and sewage treatment. We rural residents drew water from a well, burned our garbage in the backyard, and had propane delivered to a tank. We gradually assimilated all of these services into county-managed functions, with much of the credit going to former Commission Chairman Wayne Mason.
Politically, Gwinnett had been solidly in the camp of Strom Thurmond’s ‘Dixiecrat’ splinter of the Democrat Party until 1964 when Republican Barry Goldwater ran for President and opposed the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Again, the county swung heavily Republican when Ronald Reagan won in 1980, and elected GOP local leaders. Surprisingly, Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump in 2016, and Gwinnett voted strongly for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020.
That election swept in a new slate of black Democratic leadership, with the long term prediction that Gwinnett would remain a ‘blue’ county.
Leaving Gwinnett is an emotional experience for me. I recently purchased a granite headstone in Bethany Cemetery, so I will be back….some day.
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