This plaque dating from the mid-1930’s was presented to my grandfather to recognize his ten years of service as the owner and operator of what must have been one of the very smallest service stations selling Goodyear Tires in Georgia.

I have written much about Gough, Georgia and its inhabitants and I hope you will revisit my earlier blogs about this “smallest of God’s places.” Begun in the years leading up to World War I, the little town -now all but gone- prospered from the demand for cotton in the years leading up to and including the First World War.

My grandfather, Calvin Leon Sego, grew up in Augusta but left at 19 -perhaps a reaction to the influenza epidemic in his hometown -and got off the train some twenty-five miles away in Gough.

Calvin grew up in a blacksmithing family. His grandfather and father were blacksmiths and wheelwrights. Calvin attended a mechanical school for boys set up by the Catholic Church, so he was well prepared for what lay ahead.

Little more than a boy, Calvin bought a shop from a blacksmith who was retiring. Gradually, his clients were more often than not, people who needed repairs on their Model T Ford or their farm tractor. By the mid-1920’s his was a going business as farming became mechanized. He began selling tires and inner tubes (remember tube-type tires?), fan belts and rubber fuel lines -all manufactured by the Goodyear Company. He also put in a pump to distribute gasoline supplied by the Gulf Oil Company.

The plaque above must have been first designed in the late 1920’s or early 1930’s. It is cast in bronze. If you look closely you will see a dirigible (an airship) and its hanger, automobiles and trucks, an airplane, a locomotive and, in the background, the great factory in which tires and thousands of other rubber and “rubberized” products were manufactured. Before there was plastic, rubber was what enabled virtually every mechanical system to work and it supplied the waterproofing for thousands of other applications.

Issued to Calvin in about 1936, this plaque is a reminder of another time, one in which industry and agriculture became inseparable, and one in which the a new mobility made possible by automobiles would contribute to the decline of hundreds of small towns in Georgia and across the country.