By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
MAY 7, 2024 | It’s great to read of some of the early leaders of Gwinnett County being remembered. It was last week when the person for whom the Library in Snellville is named, Elizabeth Williams, was the focus of a small ceremony at the new library.
From what we have read, Elizabeth Williams’ life was one of service to the community, and as a teacher for years in Snellville schools.
Elizabeth Hiter Williams was born in Tennessee and came to the Snellville area when she was in the tenth grade. She graduated from the old Snellville High School known as the Rock School, which included grades one through eleven.
She went on to the University of Georgia and returned to teach English at the Snellville Consolidated School. It was later closed and torn down; the site is now occupied by the Snellville City Hall. When the school closed, Mrs. Williams moved to the Snellville Middle School where she taught seventh grade until her retirement, after a career of 36 years. She was enshrined by her fellow teachers in the Gwinnett County Association of Educators Hall of Fame.
Williams
Jim Cofer, who recently wrote the history of Snellville, and who now lives in Birmingham, remembers her as one of his teachers. “If there are two words to describe her, those would be ‘spunky’ and ‘caring.’ She aroused a desire to learn in a group of farm kids who had very little other intellectual stimulation.”
Cofer says that “the man who built the original E.R. Snell house wanted to start a dairy. He moved the Hiter family from Tennessee to Snellville, including Elizabeth Hiter, to run the dairy around 1930. Elizabeth was first unhappy to be in Snellville until she met Oliver Perry Williams (O.P.), whom she was married to for 51 years. They produced one son and two grandchildren. They were members of the Snellville United Methodist Church.”
As a teacher, Cofer says that Mrs. Williams “was a strict disciplinarian, basketball scorekeeper, and theater coach for numerous plays. She read aloud to her classes many of the old southern classics (Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, William Green Hill, etc.) in the original dialect. She could hold a sixth grade class spellbound for an hour. You just didn’t want recess to come in the middle of one of her stories.
“She also had a bolo paddle in her middle drawer which was applied vigorously to any boisterous or offending country boy.
“On rainy days, she led the whole school in many grand marches and dances in the gym. Square dancing was one of her specialties.
“On play nights, she would come out and give an overview of the play in a booming voice that was heard all over the packed gym without a microphone. She was one of Snellville’s classic teachers and citizens.”
Her years of teaching in the Snellville area and her generosity in sharing her love of books and reading with others prompted Snellville city officials in 1988 to recommend that the library being built on Lenora Church Road in Snellville be named the Elizabeth H. Williams Library.
In September, 2023, the new Elizabeth H. Williams branch in Snellville opened, located in the city’s planned development, The Grove at Town Center, on Wisteria Drive. The new 22,000 square foot branch occupies the first floor of the two-story building and serves children, teens, and adults with community spaces, a multipurpose meeting room, 20 computer workstations, and Learning Labs that include a maker’s space and a recording space.
Don’t you know Elizabeth Hiter Williams would be proud!
- Have a comment? Send to: mail.comelliott@brack.net
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