Woodmen of the World building

The late Willard Smith (1926-2015) of Atlanta was the right person to share a timeless picture of the Woodmen of the World building in the community of O’Farrell. He was one of the last to see it standing.

The year was 1935. Woodmen of the World was a life insurance society founded in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1890. Chapters were called camps, and O’Farrell had one.

On that afternoon, Willard and his sister Peggy were playing in the camp’s abandoned building in O’Farrell when a neighbor across the street came over to see what they were doing.

“We were just looking around on the inside,” Willard, 9, said of himself and his seven-year-old sister. “Nobody minded. If we’d fallen and gotten hurt, nobody would have sued anybody back then.”

“Better come with me,” the neighbor Tom Tate said, and he took the children across the road and down inside a storm cellar. The dark cloud closed in.

When the family and guests came out, the abandoned building was learning over against a tree, destroyed.

“So, it was a good thing we hadn’t gone into that building, especially high up in its large attic,” Smith said.

At the time, Jim Hammock owned the building located across the road from the O’Farrell Methodist Church along FM 995. He was using it for storage.

Earlier in its life it had been a community store owned by the Young family, Smith recalls.

The Woodmen of the World fraternal and financial organization also met there on the second floor, but that was before Smith’s time. The building’s construction probably went back sometime around1890 for that was the year WOW was founded nationally.

WOW was also a fellowship lodge which provided a patriotic and community service along with its financial security instruments.

Its title came from founder Joseph Cullen Root who read something about woodmen clearing forests to benefit their families. And so, he founded a financial company that promised to clear financial problems for its member families.

One of WOW’s most visible services was to offer member families who had a death a distinctive tombstone depicting a tree stump. Several of these are found in the O’Farrell Cemetery and in other smaller and rural cemeteries around the county.

The symbols of the marker include an axe, wedge, maul and sawed log. The Latin words “Dum Tacet Clamat” are often inscribed and mean “Though silent, he speaks.”

An estimated 45,000 were installed in the U.S. before the practice was ended in 1920 as being too expensive.

WOW still exists. Smith had one of the few copies of the photograph of the building in O’Farrell. It may have been the only lodge in the county. He doesn’t know of another, and there is no WOW tombstone in Atlanta’s Pinecrest Cemetery. He was pleased to share the picture with the genealogical society in the library.

O’Farrell was a lively place growing up, said Smith, 83, at the time of this interview.

“We would have a monthly party at some family’s home, and since the sleeping room was also the front living room, the beds would have to be moved out to make room for the party and then moved back when the party was over.”

And if things got boring in O’Farrell, Smith said the youth would walk the dusty roads to Red Hill, Forest Hill and Midway.

Smith had been employed by the Atlanta district Highway Department for 31 years and was one of O’Farrell’s biggest fans. At the Wednesday morning men’s breakfast at O’Farrell Methodist Church, he would tell visitors he was a graduate of “OU.”

“That’s the O’Farrell University of hard knocks,” he said.

After retiring from the highway department, he and his wife Helen Green Smith set up the Smith Fireplace Shop on West Main and operated it for about 10 years.

For her part, Helen had begun her career as being the first dietician in Atlanta High School’s first lunch room. She then went on to teach home economics and later completed certification to become a third and fourth grade teacher.

Smith doesn’t know any of the names of the people in the photograph. It seems they were dressed for a social occasion.

Those young tree climbers at the top of the tree in the picture with its sawed limbs draw attention to the practice then of cutting trees back severely.

“If the tree had grown too big and its limbs were reaching outward toward the building, it would be cropped,” Smith said. “That was a general practice.”

The granite tombstone markers depict wooden limbs cropped severely as well. Such trees left standing close to a building might have protected during a heavy wind and storm. That was the purpose of storm cellars, too. In Willard’s case, the storm cellar worked best.