Juliette and Fried Green Tomatoes
Whistle stops and mill towns along Georgia rivers were a vital part of the agricultural economy. Surrounded by farms and plantations, they were the place where the local farmers brought their cotton and grains for processing and shipping, bought their supplies and caught up on county events. All across the South, many of these towns slowly and painfully died as economics pushed people off of farms and into cities.
To visit Juliette is to visit a once-bustling place that found itself on the brink of disappearing. The best perspective from which to see how geography and man came together to produce this town is to stand on the site of the cavernous, concrete ruins of the Juliette mills, looking toward the town. At your back is the Ocmulgee River, the source of power for this gigantic rock-grinding mill. The shoaled river site was perfect to harness this power. Joe Smith built the original mills and a wooden dam, the first across the Ocmulgee River. Sherman’s Union troops spared the site on their march through Georgia. For years afterwards, Smith’s sons ran the mill, which underwent a series of improvements and enlargements. Between the mill and the town lie the railroad tracks. When the Southern Railroad built the rail line by the river in 1882, a company official by the name of McCrackin named the station after his wife, Juliette.
At the turn of the century, W. P. Glover purchased the mill and renamed it the Juliette Milling Company. Hearing of another mill in Europe with the same number of large grinding stones, he added one more set, making his the largest such mill in the world. Each stone was 48 inches in diameter. There were 20 pairs of them, lined in two rows. Each row had a separate water wheel that moved the gears, which in turn moved the stones that crushed the corn. Altogether, the mill could grind cornmeal at the rate of 300 bushels an hour. Glover replaced the original mill with a new building in 1904, but it burned to the ground in 1926. One year later, a new fireproof building went up, the concrete and steel ruins of which remain today. It was a monumental, modern complex. The building had four stories with a grain elevator section extending two more stories. In all, the storage bins and steel tank could hold 77,400 bushels of grain; in an hour it could process 5,000 bushels of corn, turning half into grits and half into meal. At the height of its production, 40 to 50 railway cars of corn were brought to the mill each month and an average of seven cars of cornmeal left each day.
Glover also built a cotton mill directly across the river in Jones County. In September when cotton season opened, country wagons from all over came loaded with cotton. The farmers shopped in Juliette, further boosting the economy. By the 1930s, the company pretty much ran the town, whose main street stretched west of the tracks, providing cottages, electricity and water free to most of the 300 citizens, the majority of whom worked at the grist or cotton mill.
Despite its technological advancements, the mill still relied on the river’s natural flow to stone-grind meal the traditional way, a fact underscored during the area’s 1954 drought. The wheels didn’t turn for two months. A year later, Martha White Mills acquired the Juliette landmark; but continued making the mainstay Mrs. Juliette Grits and Jim’s Syrup brands. Eventually, the train left town and the mills closed. After that, virtually every other business faded and died. The kudzu growing along the banks of the river threatened to take over.
Until the movie. The producers needed an old whistle stop to locate their movie based on Fannie Flagg’s novel, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. From a helicopter, they spotted Juliette. They transformed an antique store near the south end of McCrackin Street, one of the last businesses left in town, into the Whistle Stop Cafe, where much of the movie’s plot unfolds. Today, the café serves country food and fried green tomatoes to tourists, and about a dozen antique stores and gift shops operate from behind the movie facades and the grey wooden storefronts on both sides of McCrackin Street. Juliette breathes life again.
January 26th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Jon Avnet, producer/director of Fried Green Tomatoes, which was filmed in Juliette.
When I first saw Juliette, Georgia, I wondered whether Kudzu ever had it so good. The whole town was being engulfed by that leafy predator. It was hot¬—Georgia summer hot and humid. So much so that when I went into the antique store that would become the Whistle Stop Cafe in my film Fried Green Tomatoes, my glasses fogged up so badly, I couldn’t see a thing inside. When I went outside, I was perspiring so badly that my glasses kept sliding off my nose.
It was a town that time forgot. When I walked out on the dam and looked back over the lake towards the town, I knew I had found my Southern home. It was so tiny, so devoid of people and so clearly a town where memories were far richer than the today’s comings and goings. I could smell the barbecue. I could hear the laughter of children running up the muddy street. I could see that old Model T pickup being dredged out of the lake. I knew I could put Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates in the movie) by those train tracks and she would hear the ghost trains of yesteryear—and the spell would be set for my movie to begin.