Americus: Koinonia, Habitat, and the Shadow of Andersonville

Americus, Georgia sits in the red-clay flatlands of the southwest part of the state, a small city that carries more history per square mile than most places ten times its size.

Ten miles to the north is Andersonville, where the Confederate prison camp known as Camp Sumter operated for fourteen months during the Civil War. At its peak in August of eighteen sixty-four, more than thirty-two thousand Union prisoners were confined on twenty-six acres without adequate food, shelter, or clean water. Nearly thirteen thousand of them died there. Americus served as a hospital town during those same months, and Confederate soldiers who did not survive their wounds in local hospitals are buried in the city's Oak Grove Cemetery.

But the most significant story to emerge from Americus came in nineteen forty-two, on a six-hundred-acre farm on the outskirts of town. Clarence Jordan, a Southern Baptist minister with a doctorate in New Testament Greek, co-founded Koinonia Farm as an intentional Christian community where white and Black families would farm, eat, and worship together. In the deep South in the nineteen forties, this was not merely unconventional. It brought economic boycotts, Ku Klux Klan night raids, and bullets through the windows. Jordan refused to leave.

Millard Fuller, a businessman, and his wife Linda had arrived at Koinonia in the late nineteen sixties, while Jordan was still alive, and developed a new idea rooted in what Jordan had called partnership housing: neighbors helping neighbors build decent homes at no profit. In nineteen seventy-six, the Fullers incorporated that idea as Habitat for Humanity International, headquartered in Americus.

Jimmy Carter, who grew up about ten miles away in Plains, became Habitat's most visible volunteer in the nineteen eighties, swinging a hammer on job sites from New York to Nepal. The organization he helped promote now operates in more than seventy countries.

Americus is quiet today, but the ground here has been anything but.