(Editor’s Note: the author is a retired veterinarian.)
By Ray Dunahoo
BERKELEY LAKE, Ga. | During the middle 1950s, there arose property tax issues along the DeKalb-Gwinnett County line. The property owners, mainly farmers, were receiving property tax bills from both counties.
Dunahoo
After a period, some of the owners declared that they would pay no taxes to either county until a property line was established. Finally, then Gov. Marvin Griffin commissioned Barrow County Surveyor Horace L. Dunahoo, my father, giving him full authority to study platt documents and establish a county line between the two counties. (I worked with my dad many days during the process.)
Prison labor was used to place monuments along the established line. On one occasion while researching county records at the courthouse in Lawrenceville, my father found a document stating that the county line ran along the left buggy tract of the Old Hightower Trail.My father mused: “I wonder which way the buggy was going.”
On another occasion, a farmer bitterly complained that the new county line placed his home in one county and his barn in the other county.
Such were the problems encountered in establishing the final 32 miles, over a period of six months.
As an aside, in 1914 Gwinnett, Walton and Jackson counties came together at a point located now in Winder, Barrow County. Ga. Today a concrete marker located across the street from the courthouse in Winder denotes where the three counties came together. On July 3, 1914, Barrow was formed from the other three counties. Horace L. Dunahoo, my father, was the first white child born in Barrow County.
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