The County Tried to Take My Family’s Pecan Orchard for a Developer’s Shopping Center. They Didn’t Count on a Box of 1923 Papers

My name is Thaddeus Whitcomb. Everyone calls me Thad. I’m 55 years old, and I grow pecans on two hundred acres outside Albany, Georgia.

My great-grandfather, Josiah Whitcomb, bought this land in 1923. He was the son of a sharecropper. He saved every penny for twenty years, and he planted the first pecan trees with his own hands.

Some of those trees are still standing. Almost a hundred years old, eighty feet tall, still producing.

My wife, Denise, passed away four years ago. Since then, it’s been me and my grandson, Marcus, who’s sixteen. His mother, my daughter, is a nurse in Atlanta. Marcus spends every summer with me in the orchard, and he decided last year that he was going to stay for good.

The ladies at our church say I’m the best-looking deacon in Dougherty County. I tell them that’s a very small competition.

Last spring, a certified letter came from the county.

The county commission had approved a new “economic development project.” A shopping center, a hotel and a parking lot on the highway.

They needed my land.

They were going to take it by eminent domain.