Adel, Ga. "At this stand in Adel, Ga., a good melon costs 15¢. In the North it would cost 40¢." — LIFE Magazine, August 9, 1937.
The Cook Book · Photo Archive
Pulled from family albums, a courthouse basement's worth of clippings, and one genuine 1937 issue of LIFE magazine — the pictures this county has been quietly keeping. Not a history. A story, told in what people bothered to photograph.
01
August 9, 1937. LIFE was four months old and already the biggest picture magazine in the country — and it sent a photographer to a melon field outside Adel. The feature named the town directly, and it profiled a local man, Roy E. Parrish, as "a watermelon king." This is a privately held original copy, photographed page by page.
Cover · Vol. 3, No. 6
Ten cents an issue. The cover line ran flat under the masthead: "Watermelons to Market." Inside, the caption read "if any town is the capital of the watermelon world it is little Adel (pop.: 1,800) in Cook County" — a favorite of the Adel district was the Cuban Queen, yellow with green stripes, prized for flavor over shipping durability.
Source — LIFE, Time Inc., Aug. 9, 1937
"The watermelon starts its journey to market in an ordinary wheelbarrow." Cuban Queens ran about thirty pounds apiece, and the loaded barrow had to be trundled across soft, sandy field the whole way.
A field stretching to the treeline, dotted with melons — the LIFE photographer's straight, wide shot, no people in it at all. Just the crop this county was known for, and the sky over it.
Skilled packers stacked the melons three-deep on a bed of straw before the cars rolled out. Even careful packing allowed for one breakage in twenty — the fruit that made the most money never stayed in Georgia.
A note on this material. One page of the original 1937 spread uses the racial language typical of its era's editorial voice. It's kept in the family archive as a real, unaltered document — a look at how a national magazine actually wrote about this county and its Black farm labor — but it isn't reproduced here without that context. Available on request.
02
What Adel built, and what Adel kept records of — the buildings, and the paper that covered them.
Built 1910
Dr. and Mrs. R.C. Woodard came back to Adel from Augusta in 1900 to build a life and a medical practice. The neoclassical house they raised in 1910 — Doric-columned portico, corner brackets and dentils, six coal-grate fireplaces — later became the town's hospital.
This is the porch this whole project keeps circling back to: broad, columned, lived-in. Not a plantation house. A house you'd actually sit on.
Source — Cook County history reprint, courtesy the Discover Cook archive
Built eighteen years after the town's incorporation, at Fourth and South Hutchinson — the city later loaned it to the brand-new Cook County for ten years as a courthouse. Torn down, replaced, and today the site is a dentist's office. A. A. Parrish sat on the building committee.
The Adel News' first issue ran September 14, 1889, a month before the town itself was chartered. Founding editor A. H. Shaw asked readers' patience with "the cold frigidity of a heartless literary critic" — this is the paper I now write for, and the one that made me, whether I asked it to or not.
03
Governor, then candidate — before the White House, Jimmy Carter's Georgia included Cook County, and Cook County has the photographs.
Governor Jimmy Carter and his daughter Amy at a civic ribbon-cutting in Adel, mid-1970s — the kind of small-town errand a rising politician still made time for, in a county of a few thousand people.
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter in front of the Adel post office, 1976 — the year the campaign that would end at the White House ran straight through the middle of this town.
04
A cemetery statue, a store's own currency, and the first written record of a battle fought on the land Cook County would become.
A marble figure carved with pale blue-stone eyes stands over Myron Griggs Hinson's grave in Adel's Woodlawn Cemetery — the kind of Victorian mourning statuary you don't expect to find in a South Georgia farm county, and can't stop looking at once you have.
G. W. Hinson's trade tokens, circa 1909 — company currency good for goods at one store, in one crossroads community, and nowhere else. Before there was a bank in Cecil, this is what money looked like.
Blackshear's own account of Brushy Creek, printed as a postscript in the Federal Union of Milledgeville — a colonel's field report on a fight fought on the land Cook County would become, ninety-three years before there was a Cook County.
Brushy Creek, 1836
Blackshear commanded the 69th Regiment, Georgia Militia, at Brushy Creek — the engagement pictured in the field report at left. Two militiamen dead, twenty-two Muscogee dead, eighteen women and children taken prisoner: a battle this county's soil absorbed long before anyone thought to name it.
Source — Federal Union, Milledgeville, Ga., July 26, 1836
05
The family end of the archive — the pictures nobody had to explain to me twice.
Undated · Cook County
Seven of them, posed on the family farm — Sunday clothes, a fence and a stand of trees behind them, and at least three of these kids visibly unhappy about the whole arrangement. This is the exact texture the rest of this project is trying to earn: worn, sepia, unbothered by the camera's opinion of it.
John McDermid, ninety-two years old and failing, sent his daughter Flora a postcard from Adel — small, plain news of his health and hers, the kind of letter that only matters because it survived. He died the following year.
With his wife and daughter, Mrs. Murdock, in front of the home, 1897 — a Scots-born pioneer who lived long enough to be photographed on his own porch. He'd raise it again in a postcard six years later: are you coming to see me?
Source. The McDermid postcard and portrait were researched and published by Linda W. Meadows, "John McDermid's 1903 postcard to his daughter, Flora McDermid Williams," Adel News-Tribune, May 15, 2019 — credited here with thanks.