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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part three of a three-part series. You can find the first two parts of the series in the Wednesday and Thursday editions of the Valley Times-News.

In talking about the post-Civil War period, CVHS Past President Malinda Powers said it would take years for a sense of normalcy to return. “Most of the soldiers who had served had to walk home, many all the way from Virginia,” she said. “Many never returned.”

Henry Merz, a Bavarian immigrant who had been a founding member of Heyman-Merz & Company before the war, died in the 1862 Battle of Antietam, known to Civil War historians as the bloodiest day in U.S. history. One of Ruben and Arabella Lanier’s five sons had been killed in the Atlanta campaign. Their youngest son, 16-year-old Alexander Campbell Lanier, was taken prisoner after the Battle of West Point. The surviving Lanier brothers would go on to great success in textile manufacturing and banking in the local area.

A local planter, George Huguley, hid some of his cotton bales in local swamps to keep them from being destroyed by Union troops. He was later able to sell them to come up with the money to convert an old grist mill on the river at Lower Town (later named River View) into a textile mill.

A few miles upriver in Upper Town (later Langdale), a group of investors headed by James McClendon pooled their resources to start a second textile mill. Both went into production in 1866.

Powers described how the two mills struggled in the ensuing years. They’d been hard hit by the Panic of 1873 and eventually fell under the control of brothers Lafayette and Ward Crockett Lanier, both of whom had been successful in the mercantile, banking and insurance business in West Point.

They formed the West Point Manufacturing Company in 1880 and shifted production from osnaburg to oceanic duck. “They brought over a father and son, Thomas and William Lang, from England to run the two mills,” Powers said. “They acquired new machinery to make duck instead of osnaburg.”

West Point had become a thriving place by the 1880s. “It was a great decade for the city,” Powers said. “Isaac Hagedorn moved here to start a successful business. William Henderson Huguley was a leading merchant. He was into a wholesale grocery and into hardware. The A.M. Eady & Company was a well-known business in West Point.”

The Lanier brothers built a three-story building in the heart of downtown. The first two floors are still there on the corner of West 3rd Avenue and West 8th Street. The top floor was blown away by a devastating tornado in 1920 and never replaced.

A marker on the front of the building tells of its history. Those taking part in a Saturday morning walking tour of the downtown district stopped to read it. It tells of W.C. and L. Lanier having it built in 1884. A bank was on the first floor, offices for West Point Manufacturing on the second floor and an opera house on the top floor.

The opera house was the place to go in its day. At the time, West Point was a major stopping place on the A&WP Railroad. Business travelers would often stop to spend the night in one of four major hotels that were in business at the time in the downtown area. William Jennings Bryan once spoke at the opera house. Famed performers such as Jenny Lind and Lilly Langtry took to the stage here as well.

Cobb Memorial Archives has a book written by West Point native George P. Oslin, who grew up here in the late 1800s. As a young man, he wrote for The Macon Telegraph and went on to a successful business career in New York City, where he is credited with popularizing the singing telegram.

Oslin writes of seeing Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in West Point and getting some up-close views of the famed showman and marveling at the shooting skill of Annie Oakley. He also writes of Harry Houdini being placed in heavy chains and locked inside a trunk and lowered into the Chattahoochee from the river bridge. Amazingly, Houdini and the trunk hit the water separately. The city’s police chief at the time is said to have tried to stop the performance in advance, not wanting anyone to drown in the river on his watch.

Powers spoke of an 18-year-old lad bringing West Point into the 20th century with fast, efficient telephone communication. His name was James Smith Lanier. He started the West Point Telephone Exchange, getting some help from the famed Thomas Edison to get it underway. “He purchased some batteries from him to get it started,” she said.

In 1913, thirty of West Point’s leading citizens joined forces to start the Riverside Club on the west bank of the Chattahoochee. A decade later, they relocated west of Lanett to start the Riverside Country Club and the home that had been built near the river became the Magnolia Club. It’s still there between Hawkes Library and the John C. Barrow Bridge. For years, the Magnolia Club served as a guest house for those who came to town for business with WPMC and its successors. A man named Bill Farley would stay there on his visits to the local area.

In 1915, local businessmen W.C. Batson and Edmund Cook opened a hardware store that was still in business on West 5th Avenue in West Point. A few years later they started a construction company that became internationally known. It remains a dynamic business today.

A four-month period between December 1919 and March 1920 was one of the darker periods for West Point. The worst flood of the 20th century inundated the town in December 1919. Water was in the downtown streets for several days, trapping a number of people on second floors and attics for days. One of them, a World War I veteran by the name of Shaefer Heard, would play an important role in lobbying for a dam on the river above West Point. Another bad flood in 1961 led to Congressional approval for a dam and lake on the river in the Flood Control Act of 1962. West Point Dam and Lake have been in operation since 1975.

Between 1900 and 1975, there were 75 floods in downtown West Point, a flood being defined as river water being on the street in front of South State Bank. Since the dam has been in operation, there has been only one such floor, coming in May 2003.

The bad event in March 1920 was a tornado that killed 15 people in Alabama and Georgia. It started in Elmore County and cut a 60-mile path across Tallapoosa and Chambers counties before causing significant damage in Lanett and West Point. The tornado destroyed two churches in Lanett (Ebenezer and Goodsell) and one in West Point (Christ Church, the forerunner of West Point Presbyterian). A local man who sought refuge from the storm inside the church that day, Isham Stanley, was killed when the roof collapsed on him, pinning him underneath. He had turned 17 years of age on April 16, 1865 and had spent most of the day being one of the defenders inside of Fort Tyler.

Between the 1919 flood and the 1920 tornado, the local area had been hard hit by the Spanish flu. Many people died from it.

Powers said that any discussion of life in the Valley in the 20th century would have to include the role of Wet Point Manufacturing and a man known as L.J. Duncan, who had theaters in West Point and in every mill village community in the Valley. The first movie to appear in The West Point Riviera was “Birth of a Nation.” In the late 1930s, Duncan’s Al-Dun Amusement Company acquired the Charles Hotel in West Point and extensively refurbished it into the General Tyler Hotel, which was the most appealing place of its day.

General Tyler would host New Year’s Eve parties that would draw people from Atlanta. They’d come by train to swing in the new year with some ballroom dancing to the sounds of live music provided by a big band. Local civic clubs that met there would have prominent people come to speak. Dr. George Washington Carver, for example, was an internationally respected scientist when he came to speak to the West Point Rotary Club in 1939.

The offshoring of the U.S. textile industry created a down period in the early 2000s but brought new life in the form of the auto industry and a four-year college. West Point is now home to Kia Motors Manufacturing Georgia and its expansive supplier base. The main plant is located on a 600-acre pad in plain view from I-85. Anyone who drives by there is most impressed with what they see.

“Kia is offering a new chapter in West Point’s history,” Powers said.