The Clem Community.

When the Cooks settled in Carroll County the area where most of them lived was called the Clem Community. For the most part, they are still there today. The following article appeared in the "Times - Georgian" on September 26, 1993

A Walking Tour of Clem, Then and Now
Friendly ghost still roam Clem
By Allen Browning
As told by M. T. Fuller

At the end of the popular movie, "Fried Green Tomatoes", the story's narrator ambles through a rural Georgia ghost town which was once a lively little community where the story's plot has unfolded. She ends the movie saying the town lost its heart and died with the closing of a cafe in the square which was the town's social center.

The Clem community hasn't died; it was never an incorporated town to begin with, and many people still live there and perceive Clem as a distinct place. But if you drive down Clem-Lowell Road and cross the railroad tracks at the point where a railroad depot and some country stores were once operated, you can still get the same sense of a small, lost world; and if you take a road trip around Clem with M. T. Fuller, a retired public school principal who has lived in Clem most of his life, you can hear an informal narrative of the town's past 75 years that's part straight history and part "Peyton Place".

"They's all kind of tragedies in here, boy, I'm telling you". says Fuller, a rangy six-footer whose clear, booming voice hasn't been weakened by 72 years and a bout with skin cancer. He describes the community on a balmy afternoon as he drives down the back roads of Clem and Cross Plains, pointing out details about houses and churches and the people who lived in them, and graveyards where people he knew are buried.

Fuller agrees that every rural community, anywhere, has its little dramas, its little secret histories of love or violence; and he knows about most of those stories that have unfolded in Clem or the adjoining communities. He knows who quietly pined and lusted for whom. He knows who got shot to pieces in an argument over a woman or a moonshine bust. He'll tell you about it, if you don't repeat specific names.

"Many of these people's relatives are descendants still live here, and they'd run me off", he says, only half joking, though a long afternoon spent with M. T. leaves the impression he's a popular guy. People beam at him and speak to him readily, and old women willingly hand him their single prints of ancient photographs of ancestors. A lot of people know him because his family is an old one and he's been the Clem poll manager for 26 years.

M. T. remembers a livelier Clem, a place that was a little more self-contained in the earlier part of the century. Aside from the depot, there were three general merchandise stores, doctors who practiced out of their houses and a post office. Fuller mentions the post office a lot, as does another man who points out Clem once had its own zip code. The presence of a post office seems to have served as the official anointment of a village as a place that mattered. Clem's post office was operated until 1973; the last location having been a tiny one room shack which still stands a few hundred feet off Clem-Lowell Road. The postman, who for many years was a Mr. Davenport who delivered with a horse-drawn buggy, traveled along a designated "star route".

Like almost every other Carroll town or village, Clem swelled with the construction of a railroad. The tracks came through the cotton-farming community in 1894. The depot, built a short time later, was a pick-up point for cotton that was ginned at a steam-run gin built near the depot. The gin was built near the community's first store, built by John Henry Jones.
M. T. can name three stores that were open by the time he and his family moved into the community from Lowell in the 1930s. ( His grandfather had attended classes at a schoolhouse in Clem in the 1880s.)

"The three stores were Lasseter's, Phillip's, run by my uncle, Tom Phillips, and the store run by Joe McCarty," says Fuller. "They sold mostly groceries; but Lasseter was a general merchandise: clothing, shoes, plow tools, harnesses, hardware and gasoline; and you've got it pretty well covered when you've got that."

M. T. emphasizes there was a place called "North Clem." North Clem had another store, C, O, Bates' grocery and blacksmith shop for mules and horses. C. O. sharpened plows, repaired farm tools and sold gasoline. Bates' son still lives in Clem.

Until 1952, a passenger train ran through the town. "During the (second world) war, the train did a good business hauling people, because the gas was rationed, "says M. T. "You could ride the train to Carrollton at lunch, because at that time two trains passed through Clem. The northbound went to Chattanooga and the south to Griffin. You could ride the mail bus back in the late afternoon."

At the depot, farmers loaded cotton, cottonseed and lumber for sale at urban markets. The trains brought in fertilizer, which was stored in three warehouses next to the depot for sale to local farmers. The train would also deliver big packages for the locals. The packages would be dropped off at the depot and sit there until picked up.

"My daddy ordered some Sears, Roebuck blacksmithing tools through the catalog. They were left at the depot. There wasn't a big fear of theft, but Lasseter would watch them. If you lived a ways from the depot, they'd send a card saying the stuff was in."

Clem never had a drug store; but M. T. says several doctors practicing in the village kept their own stores of pharmaceuticals in their houses, where they practiced. The one name M. T. remembers is Dr. Aderhold ("We're going back 60 or 70 years now").

Local children attended the old Clem Jr. High School, a sturdy and sizable brick building which had classes through the 10th grade until it burned in the late 1960s. Then they went to the now defunct Whitesburg High School. The Clem Junior High had been an amalgam of the old Whooping Creek School, Union School and Old Clem School.

The locals grew cotton, the cash crop, plus corn, wheat, oats and hay. Everybody had a vegetable garden and a "milk cow" and hogs. There were three classes of people: landowners, renters and sharecroppers.

The "landowner" tag is self-explanatory. The renters worked somebody else's land, but furnished their own mules, plow tools and other equipment. They had to give the landowner every fourth bale of cotton and every third bale of corn. The renters were mostly white. The sharecroppers didn't own anything. They had to use equipment and animals owned by the landowners, and give the landowner a higher proportion of the harvest.

Cotton was indeed king, even deep into this century. As Fuller rides around Clem, he points out there aren't exactly any old-growth forests. Most of the tree cover is low, immature-stands of pine. That's because the terrain previously was almost completely cultivated with the white gold. Fuller can point to a few spots of ground on his family's property which are now covered with the Pine, then show you an old photo of the same piece of land, devoid of trees and covered with row crops.

The 1950s swept away much of the village's self-containment. The railroad discontinued its passenger service, and with the widespread construction of chain stores and the increased availability of autos the little general stores faded.

After talking about his early life in town, M. T. takes his visitor to two cemeteries. One is owned by the Gilley family of Cross Plains and the other is the Ephesus Christian Church.

It's in the graveyards that M. T. can conjure Clim's ghosts.

The Ephesus graveyard is on a grassy knoll behind the church's simple brick building, which to an urbanite's thinking is out in the middle of nowhere. The actual graveyard is walled in on four sides by cinderblock and the graves are set in dusty red clay with no grass. "Some of these old-timers won't have it for their graves to be sodded," says M. T.

He walks from grave to grave. "This man here, he was real quiet. (Pointing to a stone.) "He just didn't say much. Friends said when he called in his cows, he'd just wave his arm (demonstrating by waving in a big arc.) When he called in his pigs, he'd just do this. (A little come-hither motion with the hand.) But he didn't waste any actual words beckoning to them."

"This ol' boy here (points) was shot -- in a drug deal... Over there (pointing to a stone twenty, thirty yards away) is the boy who shot him... Yeah, they were rough boys..."

"This person here (gives a name), he was a good fellah.

"These two (a man and woman buried together) were outsiders. I don't know that much about them. You just don't see that name much. What you will see is a lot of Cooks, Phillipses, Knotts, Clarks and Rooks. They're the big families."

He points out the grave of a man named John T. Clark. "He had hunted right here, and had said to his hunting partner that this would be a good site for a cemetery. Then he was killed in a gun accident when one of his own friends was shooting at someone else, missed and hit him. He ended up being the first person buried here."

Later, driving down another road, he points to houses and tells about what has happened to people who have lived in them or still live there. He weaves a web of long-faded emotional entanglements, through such tales as an uncle who was shot by someone who was moonshinning and thought the uncle had been the one to report him to the Treasury Dept.

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