The History of Two Towns
Once upon a time there was 2 towns right together.
The town limit signs were back to back. You went out of one and immediately
into the other. The names of these towns was Lula and Bellton. In the fifties
most of the wells in the Bellton community went dry, by this time Lula already
had a water system up and running. Bellton residents had to "haul" water from
Lula and tried to bargain with Lula to run their water lines to Bellton. Lula
refused, but did agree to pipe water to Bellton provided the residents of
Bellton would merge with Lula and the town would be known as Lula. This was
the only thing that the residents of Bellton could do because they could not
afford a water system of their own, therefore the 2 towns became one and Bellton
was no longer a town but the people who had lived in Bellton for years and
years still said they lived in Bellton. written and contributed by Bobbie Moore
There are things that still carry the Bellton name.
Bellton Bridge Road, Bellton Baptist Church. But for some reason during this
transition one of the "L's" was dropped from the spelling and now it is spelled
Belton except the "old timers" still spell it with 2 L's and that's the way
it should be spelled.
I was born in 1932 on Moccasin Gap road in a shack
that my Mother and Daddy had to move hay out of in order to move in. We lived
in Flowery Branch, GA for a few years and in Cornelia, GA for approximately
4 years. My Father worked for the Southern Railroad, it is Norfolk Southern
now. We moved back to Lula in the early forties. At that time Lula was a booming
railroad town. Lula was considered to be the half-way point between Atlanta
and Greenville, SC, the route that the trains ran. Steam engines needed water
and coal and Lula was the place they got this in order to reach their distination.
There was 3 tracks running through Lula. A north bound track, a south bound
track and a "side" track. This was the track that a train would pull onto
in order to let another train, going in the same direction, pass.
Five nights a week there was 3 train crews that "camped"
in Lula overnight. They were, North Local, South Local and Athens Branch which
camped here every night. These crews were made up of the engineer, the fireman,
the flagman, the brakeman and the conductor and all the trains had the red
caboose. There was several passanger trains that stopped in Lula to pick up
passangers or let some off. You could catch a train in Lula go to Atlanta,
shop and get home before dark. All of the mail was transported by trains.
Freight was shipped by rail.
When Bellton was a town of its own, the postmistress
would put the mail going out in a mail pouch, take it up to the railroad track,
hang it on a pole that extended over the track and when the train came by
the baggage master on the train would take a hook and grab the mail bag and
pull it into the train. The mail that was coming into Bellton was thrown out
of the train onto the ground. The mail was handled the same way in Lula except
for the trains that stopped and then the mail bags and packages were put on
a "cart" and pulled over to the railroad track and then manually put on the
train and gotten off the train.
During World War II, there were a lot of troop trains
that came through Lula loaded with young men either going to war or coming
home from war. Sometimes the troop trains would have to pull onto the side
track to wait for another train to pass. The people around would carry peaches,
apples or what ever they had over to the trains and give to the service men,
During this time there were a lot of freight trains running and carrying all
sorts of military equipment. I remember when Franklin D. Rosevelt died in
Warm Spri ngs, GA and his body was carried to Washington by train. The train
carried his body in a baggage car with the wide doors open and the flag draped
casket could be seen as it went up the track at a speed on only 15 miles per
hour. The train was due to come through Lula around 2 pm and school dismissed
at noon so the students could see the train come through Lula. All that saw
this was witnessing history in the making.
Another memory that I have is when a train had to
pull onto the side track and would be there for some time and there were refrigerated
cars on the train. These cars were used to ship fruits and vegetables and
had big blocks of ice in them. The young boys in Bellton and Lula would climb
down in the cars and throw ice up to the top of the boxcar to another person
waiting up there and they in turn would throw the ice onto the ground. Everyone
in town would have homemade ice cream that night. We only got ice every Friday
and it would just be a small block and we would wrap it up and keep it until
Sunday so we could have iced tea for lunch on Sunday. We had a square "card"
that had 10,15,20 and 25 printed on it and we would put this in the window
with the amount of ice we wanted on the top for the ice man to stop and leave
the ice. There was no movie theater, no swimming pool, no mall but as youngsters
we always had something to do. Most of it was work but that did not hurt us.
Growing up in Lula was quite an experience. Sometimes I wonder what young
people would do today if they had to live without the modern things they have.
