Surrounded by chirping crickets and the ambient noise of a window A/C unit, the Turner County Project sat down to talk with Roger Giddens, longtime resident, on Friday, April 26, 2024. We talked about the hard work of many jobs he had growing up, the fast cars and drag racing through the Ashburn streets, and the fascinating story about his daddy’s own currency he created: the Giddens Coins!

Some of this interview has been edited for clarity.

Growing Up Giddens and Working the Saw Mill

Turner County Project: Tell me about you. Tell me about where you were born and everything. Who were your parents?

Roger Giddens: I was born in Tifton but I lived here in Turner County. Bill Giddens and Mae Pearl Ward Giddens were my parents.

Turner County Project: What it was like growing up here in Turner County?

Roger Giddens: I grew up on the sawmill and I wouldn’t give nothing for that. It was just unreal. We had about 40 or 50 hands or more. We had the sawmill, we had the big farm and all that. We stayed busy year round. On that sawmill, it was unreal to watch people come in and buy that lumber. We would sell it to them. 

Turner County Project: What was it like with your dad owning the sawmill?

Roger Giddens: The sawmill, it was hard work. He worked us there all day. He gave us a 6.5-7 foot post and gave us a draw knife and had us peel it. We had to peel all that bark off. And also, me and my brother Rex, we would load up the little short pieces of wood that they made firewood out of – Rex and myself would load that truck over like this [gesturing high] and it was full. We would deliver it to people’s houses for $3 for the whole load. That was a day’s work, there.

Turner County Project: How old were you at that time?

Roger Giddens: Probably 10 or 11. It was big money back then. We got it and went to the theater. Got into the theater I think it was for a quarter or $0.35. And we went up there to buy a drink and french fries for about a quarter and sat there and watched the theater all day on Saturday. We would watch it over and over again. 

Turner County Project: You would watch the same movie again? They only featured one movie?

Roger Giddens: Yeah. And oh, they were the best french fries. The hamburgers, everything, was so good there. I hated it when it burned down because that was a historical site there.

Turner County Project: I have always seen exterior photos but I wish an interior photo existed. It would be so cool to see!

Roger Giddens: It had the upstairs, that is where the blacks sat and the whites down the bottom. [editor’s note: This was during the middle of the Jim Crow era in the 1960s]. 

Giddens Coins

Turner County Project: Let’s pivot back to the sawmill… Didn’t your parents own a store as well? Where was it located? Are the buildings still there?

Roger Giddens: Yes, they had everything in the store including meat. Mama ran the store back then. This was all in Giddensville, one mile from Coverdale. Towards Sycamore. It’s in the Giddens Road area. There is a shop building still standing beside the store where they worked on the equipment that is still there. Everything to do with the sawmill, they took care of it there. We also got in the propane business and we had 3 big 30,000-gallon tanks behind it. They raised cows, too. We had a thousand-acre farm and grew peanuts, corn, soybeans, cotton, and had a few watermelons. The favorite thing we grew was watermelons because if you bust one, you got to eat it. To this day, I don’t eat watermelon anymore. I ate way too much of it. But my family, we just had a little bit of everything. 

Turner County Project: Tell me about the Giddens coins that I have seen.

Roger Giddens: Dad came out of Florida around 1937. He was in the fruit business. He was pretty well off in terms of cash and he bought a farm up here. Then he ran into my mama and that was his Georgia peach. They went back to Florida but Mama said she wanted to go home. So either he had to let her go or come with her and he came with her. So that is how they got here. Daddy decided that rather than handling a lot of cash, he paid all of the sawmill employees the Gidden’s coins. The people in town would honor it. They would call him, he would come up and take the coins back and pay them real cash for it. Even the banks took them and exchanged them for cash. Dad and the head of the bank were really good friends. 

Turner County Project: It says a lot about your dad’s reputation with the business owners and banks that they trusted him enough to do this deal and know he would go up there and pay them back for it. Especially with him not being from here. I cannot see that happening now.

Fast Cars and Freedom

Turner County Project: What did you do for fun besides going to the theater as a kid?

Roger Giddens: Fish. Worked on cars to make them faster. Did a little drag racing around town. 

Turner County Project: Where did you drag race?

Roger Giddens: Anywhere we wanted to. We even ran from red light to red light over here [on Washington Avenue]. 

Turner County Project: Really?! And the police never stopped you? How old were you?

Roger Giddens: No, they would sit there and watch us to see who won. [chuckles] I was 15. And I would go home at night and would go to Sycamore and sit there on Coverdale Highway and I would speed my car up. And here comes the Sycamore Police. He would throw his light on and I would take off. I would outrun him and he told me later on, “You know, I really wasn’t going to chase you but I like to see when you take off when you punched the gas to it, you wouldn’t see nothing but black smoke. And your tail lights getting littler and littler.”

Turner County Project: Speaking of Sycamore, how different is the town now compared to back in the 1960s?

Roger Giddens: It is way different. At one time, Sycamore was busier than Ashburn. It was what I was always told. There was a colonial store, the post office, a mattress shop, an upholstery shop, and a service station. One Stop Denhams was like a small Walmart store. He [the owner of OSD’s] said that if he didn’t have it, you didn’t need it.

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About The People of Turner County Project:

This is an oral history project that works to both preserve, document, and celebrate the people of Turner County and the history through the stories of those who have experienced it.

This project collects oral histories of people who have lived or worked in Turner County, Georgia.

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