Earl Colvin clearly has a passion for the study of history, particularly as it relates to Jones County, and his work the past 20 years easily illustrates that interest.
Colvin — 67 and retired from the Jones County Board of Education as Director of Facility Operations — is well known for his work identifying and cataloging cemeteries as well as authoring several novels and helping form an organization that focuses on the preservation of history.
Colvin’s family lived in Bibb County when he was a youngster, and he discovered he was hooked on history in the first grade.
“When I walked into Ms. Lamb’s classroom, there was a caricature of Robert E. Lee, sitting on his horse, Traveler. And, I was enthralled,” he declared.
Colvin said history was a big part of the curriculum in elementary school in particular. “And so I came to enjoy and love history; it’s always been kind of fascinating to me.”
As he grew into his teens and moved to Jones County, however, Colvin had little time to appreciate the past.
“I started working parttime when I was 12 or 13,” he recalled. “When I was 13, I started running a chainsaw all summer long. When I was a little older, I would go every afternoon and run a chainsaw in the woods.”
Times have definitely changed, Colvin proclaimed.
“Back then, even before I had a driver’s license, if everybody was busy and they needed a part, they would put me in a truck and send me all the way out there on Pio Nono Avenue in Macon nearly to Seven Bridges. And I wasn’t but 15,” he laughed.
“Even in high school,” Colvin shared with a chuckle, “I was probably the only kid in school who drove a pulpwood truck to school. Every afternoon I would drive a short truck to go get a load of wood and haul it to the mill.”
After working in that environment for a year after high school graduation, Colvin landed a job with the Jones County Board of education in July of 1976.
“I was looking for something more secure, something I could buy into, with retirement and a little more stable income,” he explained. “When I was 18 years old and started, I was doing building maintenance, bus maintenance and driving a bus.”
With the retirement of department director J.T. Comer and a heart attack suffered by Comer’s son, Melvin, Colvin’s duties increased.
“In 1980, I was in charge of building maintenance, bus maintenance, and routing drivers, for a number of years,” he said.
Almost a year after Colvin went to work there, he and Melvin Comer’s daughter, Beth, were married in July of 1977. They have two daughters, Amy and Amber, 46 and 44, and two grandchildren.
Colvin stayed with the school system until 2008, when he retired, at least temporarily.
“I retired as director of facility operations,” he explained, “Basically everything that didn’t necessarily pertain to education and instruction. At one time, transportation, buildings, everything.”
He agreed, however, to return when called.
“I went back four or five years later when they were needing somebody that could do what I had retired doing,” Colvin recalled. “I went back and helped get staff trained. I worked four years getting people ready, basically getting people to understand what needed to be done.”
Colvin’s passion for history that led to him visiting historic parks and doing research was hampered in the early years.
“Raising a family, it’s hard to find enough time to spend as much time as you’d like to, doing that,” he lamented. “You’re always busy trying to make do. With public employment, at that time pay wasn’t enough but to just get by. So I constantly worked extra jobs throughout the whole period of time the children were home to try to make a little extra.”
Colvin learned in the early 2000s from a friend that he was trying to catalog and update interment records in Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon.
“I was inspired by that,” he acknowledged. “I said, ‘Nobody’s ever done that for Jones County. I think I’d like to try that.’” He started researching the cemeteries and cataloged and datedhis first one in 2004.
“Doing the field work is something I really enjoy,” he expressed. “It’s like an overgrown Easter egg hunt. Because once you start doing it, when you go into the cemetery, you’re trying to get everything, trying, as best you can, to get the correct names and dates, and all that information down right. To make sure you don’t overlook anybody.”
Colvin noted that once he started the work, he began getting calls from people telling him locations of various gravesites, and that altered his schedule.
“I had a plan to do it section by section of the county,” Colvin explained. “The wheel kind of fell off that bus pretty quickly. Because somebody would call and say, ‘I know where a cemetery is off Morris Stevens Road.’ So I would do one off Morris Stevens Road, and the next person would call and say, ‘You know there’s a cemetery up here off Stallings.’” Colvin may not have missed church because of his newfound passion, but he missed Sunday afternoon activities.
“After church on Sundays I’d leave, and I wouldn’t come home until dark,” he confessed. “Because that’s what I did.”
The time and effort varied significantly, Colvin pointed out.
“It goes fairly quickly with family cemeteries,” he said, “but when you get to large church cemeteries or even one like the one on Joycliff (Road). I spent my whole Christmas break, a week, every day, all day long. I can’t tell you how many countless hours I have spent doing that. But, it was so gratifying to do it. I didn’t feel like it was work because I enjoyed it immensely.”
Colvin said more than 300 cemeteries were cataloged and included in a book printed in 2006, and he donated copies not otherwise obligated to the Jones County Library to sell as a fundraiser.
“It was called Fields of Stone,” he said, “primarily because so many of the places I went, the graves were simply marked by a fieldstone.”
The library did, in fact, sell all the copies of the book, and additional cemeteries that were found and cataloged by Colvin were included in the reprint, funded by Jones County History and Heritage, an organization founded in 2002 that is dedicated to preserving history of Jones County.
Colvin, currently in his second stint as president, said the organization has been very active and productive.
He pointed out that Jones County History and Heritage helped fund historical markers being placed around the county — 12 so far — as well as a seven-volume series of articles entitled, The 107 Story.
“We started that about 10 years ago,” he pointed out, “and every year for a long time we tried to print a book, and we would put 20 stories in it. We have done seven editions so far.”
The articles highlighted local individuals, clubs, churches and businesses of the past.
Colvin explained the origin of the books’ names.
“That was the county’s tag prefix, 107. So, when you look at the storybook, you see a Jones County tag with 107 on it.”
Since 2007 the organization has sponsored the Hamilton-Williams Preservationist Award, named after Annie Hamilton of the Old Clinton Historical Society and Carrie Williams, author of The History of Jones County, 1807-1907.
“We felt like they were two that carried the torch for a long time in historic preservation.”
The organization has also helped pay for building improvements.
“History and Heritage funded much of the heating and air for the school museum in the Knox Center,” the president pointed out, “and paid for much of the finishing in there.”
Colvin is proud of the three-room museum he helped establish, but he would like to see more use of it.
“We tried to open it a few times, but there is not enough local interest in history to want to come through and see it,” he declared. “But, it’s the history of education in Jones County. We’ve got it interpreted in different eras of education.”
Due to the author’s interest in the Civil War, he and Beth together published a 400-page book on Jones County veterans of that conflict. He has also been involved in activities dedicated to the memory of this nation’s bloody war against itself.
“I’ve participated in re-enactments for 15 years,” he said. “We’ve traveled all over the country to do that. We’ve been to Kentucky, Gettysburg, Mississippi, Florida, South Carolina. We’ve been all over the place.
“Got involved in that more or less to get a firsthand experience of what life would have been like in the military in that era,” he explained.
Colvin also often participates in the Old Clinton annual re-enactment as well as a service recognizing the Battle of Griswoldville.
“I have in past years conducted the memorial services for both Clinton and Griswoldville,” he shared, adding that he is the Camp Commander for the Sons of Confederate Veterans Camp in Jones County.
The historian and selftaught author said he has no immediate plans to stop promoting the preservation of history.
“It depends on if the Good Lord continues to give me good health,” he professed. “I’m blessed every day I can turn around and put my feet on the floor and get out of bed. I feel very blessed.
“I hope that maybe like my mother and grandmother, when the Lord calls me Home, I’ll be on my feet.”
