The town is named after Robert Augustus Toombs. This U.S. congressman was secretary of state for the Confederacy There he evaded Union soldiers. At one time 600 people lived there.
Toomsboro was chartered in 1904.
In the early 1950s, Route 57 was paved, along with the new Interstate Highway System, bringing about the rise of trucking and the decline of the railroad.
n 1975 Joe Boone, who owned much of Toomsboro, cleaned up an old store in the middle of town as a place where he and his friends could gather and play country and gospel music. Boone called it the Swampland Opera House, and within weeks people were coming from nearby counties to have a steak at the restaurant next door and set up folding chairs at the theater for Saturday performances. There are worn theater seats now. Windows are covered with dirt and more. Admission was anything you cared to pay. An annual Syrup Festival, named after the local sorghum syrup mill, grew around the music venue in the 1980s and 1990s. A group of locals formed a nonprofit to keep the show onstage after Boone died.
in 2000 Bill Lucardo, a retired music promoter and lumberman bought the properties at auction. He shut down the opera house and restaurant, planning to make the area a tourist attraction.
“The current owner, David Bumgardner, made his fortune selling cars in Florida and spent $530,000 for twenty-eight properties in 2002. He wanted with the notion he could turn Toomsboro into a tourist attraction. He bought up a few homes as their owners moved away or died off and spent hundreds of thousands into refurbishing the fourteen-room Willett Hotel, refinishing the nineteenth-century hardwoods. The hotel is gorgeous and it has modern bathrooms
! About that time the economy bottomed out.
As of 2010, more than 80 percent of Americans lived in cities and suburbia. Census data shows that even though Georgia’s population increased by 18 percent between 2000 and 2010, thirty-one rural counties, including Wilkinson, lost residents. When people leave, small businesses close, driving more people t
In 2013 the population was 472. The Central of Georgia Railway once stopped here night and day, dropping off and picking up goods and people. IN 2013 the cost was $2.45 million 7 % of the town, or 33 parcels of land. are empty and for sale.
The Norfolk Southern still passes through town. But it doesn’t stop. The depot is boarded up and rotting. The only real traffic on Main comes from big diesels with orange cabs hauling kaolin—an ingredient once essential to Kaopectate—between the dozens of surrounding mines and processing plants. The trucks rattle through with the slow, trickling pulse of a patient on life support. There are exactly two open businesses in what passes for Toomsboro’s downtown: the post office and the florist. I need to go back and find this and other businesses that must be in a section we didn’t find farther down the road.
As far as I could see, this part of the town is like a ghost town. There are houses on the outskirts, but they look ready to fade away.
As of 2018 the town is priced at $1.7 million and the population 700. Now in the area we saw!
https://www.southernliving.com/news/toomsboro-ga-for-sale
https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=toomsboro%20georgia&epa=SEARCH_BOX
The future for this town? https://www.facebook.com/groups/1914832545223943/about Maybe.
https://www.amazon.com/Mary-Marvella/e/B008E1SJ32
https://goodreads.com/author/show/4909455.Mary_Marvella
https://www.facebook.com/ARomanceCaper
http://www.MaryMarvella.com
https://www.facebook.com/mmbarfield
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mary-Marvella- Author/121044561311561
https://pinkfuzzyslippersauthors.wordpress.com
Follow Mary Marvella on Twitter @mmarvellab
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M.M Mayfield
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(Inside looking out from our sunspace. Geraniums love it)
