Mrs. Martha Poole passes at 85

Mrs. Martha Poole, who baked my parents' wedding cake and stored a piece of it for a year in her freezer -- it was one of those good-luck wedding traditions -- passed last week. She was 85. "Miss Martha," as I always knew her, served for many years as clerk of Superior Court in Warren County, succeeding her late husband, J. Allen Poole, in that post. Outside of work, Miss Martha had a great passion for genealogy and was often a great resource to out-of-town visitors who arrived at the courthouse to search for public records pertaining to their ancestors. You can read her complete obituary at this link.

New York Times comes to Gibson for bank closure

Well, it finally happened. No, hell didn't freeze over, but this is almost as strange: Gibson, Ga., was on the front page of the New York Times. No, I'm not kidding. It was right there on the front page on Saturday. The Times recounted the story of the shuttering of what used to be the Bank of Gibson, more recently called FirstCity. You can read it at this link, though you might have to sign up for the free Times registration to get to the story.

GBI to probe Norwood shooting involving Warren County commissioner

It's not clear from the McDuffie Mirror story who fired at who, but it does say someone shot a car door. (Honest disclosure: The Peebles guy in the story is my father. The three people who read this blog know that already, but I include that fact here to make myself feel better.)

A thank-you to our readers: No, we're not going away ...

Warrenton Watch has been around for a few years now, through good times and bad, through periods where I blogged every day and periods where I didn't get a chance to post for months.

We're not going away. In fact, I'm hoping I'll be able to post more frequently in 2009. But I wanted to stop and take a moment to thank all of you out there who read Warrenton Watch, and to step back and reflect a little bit on it.

Through the magic of the InterWebs, I have no way of knowing who reads this blog or where they are -- whether they're in Thomson or Timbuktu. But over the years I've been tickled to get e-mails from Warrentonians and former Warrentonians around the country who say they drop by my site every now and then. I appreciate each and every one of you who read, whether you and I have communicated or not.

Some of you who read Warrenton Watch are people who have known me all my life, and known my parents most of their lives, and knew my grandparents. Some of you who read, we don't know each other at all. Whoever you are, I'm thankful you read.

I started this blog on a lark, just to see if it could be done. Blogs were just a new thing then, and, at the time, not everyone had one. Now, it seems, everyone has one. (I actually have two, and I'm thinking of starting one or two others. That's in addition to my blogging at my job at www.TexasWatchdog.org.) I wish I could blog here at a more consistent frequency, but, well, life is what happens when you're making other plans, right?

I hope to blog again very soon. So I will sign off for now and wish all our readers a happy Super Bowl Sunday.

Happy new year: Our top 10 posts from 2008

In case you missed any of them. Here's the list, from No. 1 to No. 10.

• First Baptist pastor indicted 
• Warrenton's Jamie Ellis appears on Good Morning America 
• Controversial First Baptist pastor resigns
• Back from quick trip to Warrenton (July post) 
• New Aflac duck commercial coming out on New Year's Day (Note: this post went up in 2006. I'm not sure why it was so popular this year, but it was.) 
• Teachers fired for falsifying grades (this was another 2006 post) 
• Where'd I-20 go? 
• Car hits mom, son while pushing motorized car uphill 
• Need grits? Ogeechee River Mill for sale (this was a 2005 post) 
• Warren County high school principal charged in sex case