Excerpt from Bainbridge, Decatur County, Georgia Location. Decatur Count is situated in the southwestern corner of the State of Georgia bounded on the south by Florida and on the west by Alabama. The Chattahoochee River is the western boundary and the Flint River runs through the middle of the county. Both of these rivers are navigable for the larger river boats, and their outlet is at Apalachicola on the Gulf of Mexico, in close touch with the Panama Canal. The distance in time to Montgomery, Alabama, by rail is six hours, to Savannah and Jacksonville eight hours, to Atlanta twelve hours and to New York thirty-two hours. Size. The county is about forty by thirty miles and contains more than three-quarter of a million of acres. There is little of this that is not available for agriculture, and most of it is susceptible of a high state of cultivation, as will be seen by a casual survey of the county. This is brought about by both the nature of the soil, the undulating character of the lands and the many streams and rivers traversing the county that make a perfect system of drainage. Population. The population is approximately 35,000, about 60 percent, whites and 40 percent, About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Though artistic and ambitious, Paul Kwilecki (1928-2009) chose to remain in Bainbridge, Georgia, the small Decatur County town where he was born, raised, and ran the family's hardware store. He had always been interested in photography and taught himself how to use a camera. Over four decades, he documented life in his community, making hundreds of masterful and intimate black-and-white prints. Kwilecki developed his visual ideas in series of photographs of high school proms, prison hog killings, shade-tree tobacco farming, factory work, church life, the courthouse. He also wrote eloquently about the people and places he so poignantly depicted, and in this book his unique knowledge is powerfully articulated in more than 200 photographs and selected prose. Paul Kwilecki worked alone, his correspondence with important photographers his only link to the larger art world. Despite this isolation, Kwilecki's work became widely known. "Decatur County is home," he said, "and I know it from my special warp, having been both nourished and wounded by it."