An eyewitness to history

The stars keep their vigil in breeze-carressed Georgia where the magnolia blossoms and the mocking birds lend their enchantment.

"Mother Enterprise"
Nettie C. Hall
Arriving with the early settlers were printing presses and men who meant to make their fortunes by telling the colonists what was happening in the new city they were busy building. The first of a number of newspapers, mostly short-lived, to spring up in the Colony City was The Enterprise.

The first issue of the Enterprise came off a Washington hand press on December 20, 1895. D. Ellis Peiper, his father Jonathan, and a Mr. Lyons published that first issue in a frame shack located along what was called the Midway, probably near present-day Altamaha Street. It was quickly followed by other papers, including P.H. Fitzgerald's own Leader. The Enterprise proved to be a vivid chronicler of the development of a town in the south Georgia pinelands, thanks largely to the energy, dedication and faith of one woman - writer Nettie C. Hall, soon affectionately known as "Mother Enterprise."


"Beginning in a wilderness of pines, with no railroad nearer than 22 miles, and northern colonists flocking at the rate of five and six hundred at a time, until by actual count 10,000 people were on the ground within three months after the survey. . ."

Nettie C. Hall


An intrepid newswoman, in the mold of the nationally famous Nelly Bly, Hall made her way everywhere into the man's world of city-building. When the AB&A railroad shops were built east of Fitzgerald, Hall was there to inspect the operation from top to bottom, climbing up on the machinery for a better view, and describing the experience in terms that marked her as a true lover of the iron rails and the men who kept the trains running.

Soon, Hall had purchased a partnership in the paper, operating it with D.E. Peiper until September of 1899. In three short years, she had become a living legend in a community that was born with a sense of history and purpose. Her voice was the voice of the Colony City, alive to and in tune with the ambitions that had led to its founding, supportive of every new endeavour and fiercely proud of all that had been accomplished.

"The citizens are from every state in the Union. In the first years of colony life, the majority were from the north and Fitzgerald was naturally a Yankee town. Soon the Southern man, quick to discover a good thing, cast his lot among us, invested his capital, brought his wife and children here to live, and some who had no wives found one among the Yankee girls and the Yankee boys returned the compliment by falling in love with some southern girl and captured her heart until it is a difficult matter to tell "who's who" but we have the audacity to believe that we have the finest town in this part of Georgia and both sides of Mason and Dixon's line are to blame for it."

Nettie C. Hall

Her journalism career, with the Enterprise and other Colony City papers, spanned 15 years, the most critical years in Fitzgerald's history . Within that time frame, the mud and flimsiness of Shacktown had given way to a brick city boasting a Carnegie Library and a handsome federal building. The two industries that would be Fitzgerald's leading employers for decades - Fitzgerald Mills and the railroad shops - were up and running.

After her death, due tribute was paid to her with the placing of a monument, originally a water fountain, in the first plaza park south of the Main and Central intersection. Mother Enterprise, Nettie C. Hall, was the eyewitness to Fitzgerald's history. In the morgues of The Herald-Leader, on microfilm at the Fitzgerald-Ben Hill County Library and a