Broadband boost: Warren County in line to receive about $1 million in COVID relief

 A story by my AJC colleague Tia Mitchell: https://www.ajc.com/politics/rural-georgia-makes-plans-for-spending-covid-19-relief-dollars/7SD4NRCXNFFBFEL2H7LSIBN4FU/

Hancock County has become a COVID-19 hotspot

Story by my friend and AJC colleague Ariel Hart at this link.

Education leaders tour Warren County High's 'Farm-to-Table' program

Story and video from WJBF-Channel 6.

Georgia-Pacific plans major Warrenton expansion

The new facility will be capable of more than three times the plant's current output, according to a press statement from the company reported on by WRDW-Channel 12. (Update: More details from my AJC colleague Scott Trubey at this link.)

So, about those clowns over in Thomson ...

Just kidding, our neighbors in McDuffie County are fine folks. But two young men have been charged with disorderly conduct for driving outside the Thomson Walmart while wearing clown masks. More from Augusta's Fox 54 here.

End of an era: Fulghum-Carr, Warrenton's drug store, goes out of business

From Facebook: Linda Fulghum Bruggemann
 (with Molly Bloodworth) and Emile Carr
at the closing of Fulghum-Carr. 

Saw on the Facebook feed of dear family friend Linda Fulghum Bruggemann about the closing of the doors of Fulghum-Carr Drug Co., known to so many of us as just "the drug store," one of Warrenton's longest-surviving Main Street businesses, after 65 years.

There's so much that could be said here. I could tell you how I wish that despite all the conveniences of the modern world, that we could just stop time for small towns and let them, and the small businesses that drive them, just stay the way they are, like prehistoric insects frozen in amber.

Or I could tell you that the thing I always remembered and loved the most about Fulghum-Carr when I was a kid was, maybe strangely, the old wooden floor and the smell -- I don't know what it was, but it smelled like a drugstore on Main Street in a small town in the deep South should smell. It was comforting. You're not ever going to get that smell in a CVS.

And the toy aisle. Fulghum-Carr always had the best toys. Somewhere at my father's house is probably still the Little Builder tool set that were the first tools I ever owned and which I used to disassemble various objects in the house, to my mother's great annoyance.

And Theodore, my beloved childhood teddy bear. He was in the window at Fulghum-Carr when my mother took me in one day, and it was love at first sight. Santa put him under the Christmas tree for me. (He's still around and is sitting on a shelf in my bedroom here in Atlanta right now.)

But it's really hard to operate a small business in a small town, in a world dominated by Wal-Mart and Walgreens. And the most important thing to be said is to be glad that we had it around for so long.

Stay off I-20 tonight: The Mega-Load is coming through

Photo by flickr user Miguel Tejada-Flores, used under
a Creative Commons license.

A 600,000-pound machine press will be hauled up Interstate 20 through Warren County Wednesday night, taking up both lanes. The equipment, which is being hauled to Bartow County, will leave Columbia County at 7 p.m. Wednesday, headed toward Atlanta,  the Journal-Constitution reports.