Tifton: The Sawmill Town That Became the Plant Center of the World

Henry Harding Tift arrived in south Georgia in the eighteen seventies as a marine engineer who had decided that the longleaf pine forests of the coastal plain were worth more to him than any ocean. He built a sawmill, founded a settlement that took his own name, and set about logging every pine he could find. When the timber ran out, as it inevitably did, the cleared land became farmland, and Tift turned his attention to what grew in the ground instead of on it.

The town that bore his name incorporated in eighteen ninety. Two railroads, the Georgia Southern and Florida and the Brunswick and Western, had converged here, making Tifton a natural shipping point for the tobacco, cotton, and peanuts of the surrounding country. By the early nineteen hundreds, Henry Tift had added a cotton mill, a bank, a model farm north of town, and donated land for what would eventually become Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College.

The commercial blocks he helped build , brick and stone facades running from the eighteen nineties through the late nineteen thirties , are what the National Register of Historic Places now calls the Tifton Commercial Historic District, listed in nineteen eighty-six. Standing on the main street, you can read the economic history of south Georgia in the building heights: every decade of confidence is legible in the brickwork.

But Tifton's larger legacy runs through a laboratory. In nineteen nineteen, on land donated by Henry Tift himself, the University of Georgia established the Coastal Plain Experiment Station. Over the following decades, its scientists developed the grasses that now cover golf courses, stadiums, and athletic fields across the South and around the world. A plant pathologist named Glenn Burton spent his career here breeding Bermuda grass varieties that made turf management economically viable in the American South's brutal summers.

The station came to be known as the Plant Center of the World , not a boast anyone would have expected from a south Georgia sawmill town. But that is how Tifton turned out.