November 15th, 2023 – 11:15 AM
WRGA Staff Reports –
The Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation released its 2024 list of 10 Places in Peril in the state, and sites in Gordon and Bartow Counties are on the list.
The Sugar Valley Consolidated School was constructed in 1927 as a public school for children in Gordon County. It closed in 1974 and has been used for several other purposes since then. Deemed unsafe by the County, the Board of Commissioners has announced a plan to demolish the school to construct a fire station.
Meanwhile, historic sites that rest on Pine Log Mountain, a privately owned wilderness area in Bartow County, are also threatened by demolition. Those sites include a Woodlands Era rock wall and more than two dozen burial cairns built by indigenous peoples, as well as four 1840s-era stone iron furnaces used for mining before and after the Civil War, and the remains of the Sugar Hill Convict Labor Camp. The land is up for sale and Bartow County plans to rezone much of the property from agricultural to low-density housing, high-density housing, and industrial mining.
Places in Peril is designed to raise awareness about Georgia’s significant historic, archaeological, and cultural resources that are threatened by demolition, neglect, lack of maintenance, inappropriate development, or insensitive public policy.