Content area
Full Text
Welcome to Milledgeville, the little college town that could - and will. It's a community in flux, with not one but two campuses downtown exploding beyond their borders. Milledgeville is also growing in retail, industry and tourism. In the last category, the town has an edge over the rest of eastern Georgia, with a unique position in Southern literature as home to Andalusia, where Flannery O'Connor
penned such macabre classics as Wise Blood.
Once Georgia's capital, Milledgeville is also rich in state history, and houses the mammoth Central State Hospital, the Southeast's largest mental health institution. It is a significant cultural center on a par with Athens, Macon or Augusta. "The history makes you proud to be here," says newcomer Kathyjo Gordon, executive director of the Development Authority of the City of Milledgeville Baldwin County.
With steady employment and a large spectrum of resources, Baldwin County is a regional draw for the six
counties between Atlanta, Macon and Augusta. Playing on that regionalism, leaders have gang-tackled state government for funding and support, and are enjoying a wealth of improvements that are also supported by local voterapproved sales taxes. Millions have been poured into downtown, including $100 million worth of construction on the town's two campuses - Georgia College and State University and Georgia Military College - and $10 million worth of improvements to the former governor's mansion. Once the dust clears, $1 million worth of Downtown Streetscapes should be underway.
Doesn't this seem like a lot for a small town of 18,700 to handle? Indeed, it takes teamwork to coordinate such a diverse spate of activities, and leaders here are energetic, cooperative and progressive. GC&SU is Georgia's only publicly funded liberal arts college, which, the college's officials like to say, means it provides private-college level education at public school prices, and that higher education has been contagious. The majority female school (formerly the state's designated women's college) finds echoes in the county's predominantly female leadership the county manager, GC&SU president, development authority director, chamber of commerce president and convention and visitors bureau director are all female and the synergy that exists in day-to-day operations.
In this way, today's Milledgeville may be a far cry from its past, but in other ways it is steeped in...