Let the wagon wheels roll . . .

The clarion cry went out in the American Tribune, a newspaper for veterans - there was cheap land, a mild climate and an easier life to be found in Georgia. And soon they were heading south - by wagon, train and steamboat - from all corners of the country.

"We traveled from Glenfield, N.Y., to Fitzgerald, Ga., with this rig and horses. Was on the road 2 months. We had a tent we stayed in nights."
Mrs. D.A. Murdock

The colonists quickly threw up a town, remembered in later years as "Shacktown," lining both sides of a wagon road running along the crest of a long hill west of the Drew building and post office, both of which were there before the Colony was founded and constituted the old community of Swan.

"To drive along this road brought more sights than the midway of a carnival."
The Tifton Daily Gazette
1895

Arthur Shaffer, the 14-month-old child pictured holding his mother's hand at left above, walks toward the J.W. Shaffer family home with its fenced-in front yard. Its later address was 614 E. Suwannee. The tent glimpsed at the right was said to be the Michigan Restaurant and it was far from being the only early Colony establishment operating from a tent.

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