SPARTA, Ga. — In 1850, Andrew Benjamin Tarbutton enslaved 25 people in central Georgia. A year later, he purchased more than a dozen additional people off the docks in Savannah and marched them toward his home, setting the foundation for his family’s generational wealth.
Four generations later, a railroad company owned by one of his descendants is using eminent domain to seize land of poor farmers, including descendants of enslaved people, not too far from where his family’s fortunes started.
In 2024, the Georgia Public Service Commission granted the Tarbutton-owned Sandersville Railroad Co. eminent domain authority, allowing it to seize private property for what they claim is a public use: to build a rail spur to haul gravel from a local quarry.
The landowners filed a petition for judicial review of the PSC’s decision in Fulton County Superior Court. That appeal has been moving through the courts for the past two years. In February 2025, the Fulton County Superior Court affirmed the PSC’s decision but kept a pause on construction in place while the case proceeded toward further review in the Georgia Court of Appeals.
In a 30-minute hearing on Feb. 18, the three-judge panel of the Georgia Court of Appeals heard oral arguments from attorneys representing both parties and the Georgia Public Service Commission. As the petition continues to move forward, it will determine whether the railroad moves forward or stalls.
The families in the railroad’s path said they see this as another instance in a pattern of extraction that has defined this corner of Georgia since before the Civil War. One of the land parcels in question is among the largest continuous plots owned by a Black family in Georgia. It was purchased over 100 years ago by the Smith family, descendants of enslaved people who worked the same soil.
“This happens to be Black History Month, and we were looking at our culture and our heritage and how his grandparents and great grandparents got this land,” said Diane Smith, a member of the Smith family.
“We’re fighting against a man whose wealth came from slavery,” her husband, Blaine, added.
In the railroad’s petition to acquire real estate by condemnation, the company framed the spur as an “economic development” project serving the public by “reducing the number of trucks traveling on local roads,” thus alleviating traffic in the town of 1,800. But residents allege that the project is unnecessary and would primarily benefit the current railroad owner, Benjamin Tarbutton III, and a handful of other wealthy landowners, who hope to eventually connect the track to a larger line that runs to the Port of Savannah.
The Smiths are not the only descendants of enslaved people whose land and livelihood may be threatened by the railroad. The line would also cut behind the homes of 92-year-old Ida Lowe Blocker, who spent her early childhood with a great-grandmother who was formerly enslaved in the county, and 78-year-old Bennie Clayton, who worked the fields as a sharecropper alongside his father.
“We are poor people here in Sparta,” said Janet Smith, Diane’s sister in law, who helped build a small farm business on the family’s 600-acre property with her husband, Mark. Sparta, the city where the fight is taking place, is the second-poorest — and third-Blackest — town of over 1,000 people in all of Georgia.
“We may not have money, but we are rich in spirit and love — and most of us are older,” Smith said.
In response to questions about the railroad spur project, Tarbutton disputed any racial biases behind the project.
“While some opponents have tried to frame the Spur’s development through a racial lens, they ignore the facts,” he said, pointing toward the fact that most landowners facing property seizure are white. “When the route was selected, we neither knew nor considered the race of any landowners.”
Eminent domain is the power of the government, or a private company acting with government authority, to force the sale of private property for a claimed public use, so long as it pays the owner “just compensation” under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The situation in Sparta reflects a pattern documented by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: Eminent domain falls hardest on Black and brown communities, where political power is weakest.
“Communities that are more wealthy or have more political power are less likely to be impacted by eminent domain. Politicians and developers usually avoid those communities,” said Jamie Rush, senior staff attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Black people make up more than half of the Americans who’ve lost property through eminent domain since World War II, despite making up at most 14% of the country, according to several analyses.
In the federal report, commissioners and invited experts describe how “public use” — once understood as things like roads, schools, or other clearly public facilities — has been interpreted so broadly. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s Kelo v. City of New London ruling in 2005, “public purpose” can now include speculative “economic development” with only a vague promise of jobs or tax revenue. And when “public purpose” is stretched to usher in private deals, the burdens of displacement and the loss of political voice tend to land on Black and brown landowners first.
In Sparta, the railroad is pushing that logic even further, treating a benefit to a narrow set of private interests as if it were a benefit to the broader community, residents and lawyers allege. That is troubling not because the government is directly seizing land for a classic public use like a road or school, but because state power is being used to ratify one private actor’s taking of another private party’s land under the banner of economic progress.
“If I ever questioned feeling like a Black person before, I definitely feel Black now,” Janet Smith said. “It feels like they think they should be able to walk all over us without any repercussions.”
“This is the reality of Black history”
To understand what’s being destroyed, Capital B spent time with the people who’ve fought to remain in Washington and Hancock Counties in January as the region was blanketed in snow.
The air was cold enough that Blocker kept her coat on inside, even with the space heater running in the corner of her living room. Three months shy of 93, she moves carefully, but her memory is sharp. She was born just down the road from where she lives now, and her family has been in Hancock County since the 1800s.
Her great‑grandmother, Ella, whom she met as a child, and great-Aunt Julia were enslaved on the neighboring Dixon plantation. After emancipation, they joined other formerly enslaved families in Granite Hill, a thriving Black settlement of farms, churches, and schools.
Hancock County became a budding haven for Black folks in general. By 1968, it was the first county in the entire country since Reconstruction to be governed by Black political leadership.
Then the community that her great-grandmother helped build after emancipation was slowly swallowed by industrial extraction. Blasting from the rock quarries cracked foundations, dust-poisoned wells, and, slowly, people seeped from communities. Today, Granite Hill no longer exists.
“Nobody can live there anymore,” Blocker said. “It’ll be the same way here if we allow it to continue.”
The new railroad would run on the edge of her property.
Her neighbors, Bennie and Eloise Clayton, both in their 80s, followed a similar path. Born into sharecropping, they would later spend years working for Sparta’s school system and have lived in their home since 1970. Their children and grandchildren still come back on Sundays for cookouts, running around the yard that now backs up to the quarry fence. Blasting has already cracked their walls.
“My kids are not going to come back here with a train running through,” Eloise said. The railroad track would run directly behind the house.
“We have to stay here and die with that.”
However, the struggle, residents said, is a lot larger than the railroad.
In 1850, before slavery ended, Hancock County was the wealthiest county in Georgia. Over the next century, as many white landowners left and Black residents’ political power grew, investment dwindled.
“We’re one of the poorest now, and it’s not [Black politicians] fault, but it seems to be a lot of corruption at every level,” Janet Smith said from Clayton’s house in the early morning. She was referring to a 2015 legal fight around guaranteeing the Black vote in Sparta.
In 2015, the county’s majority-white Board of Elections and Registration systematically challenged the registrations of 174 Sparta voters, almost all of whom were Black, ahead of local elections.
Sheriff’s deputies delivered summonses to Black residents’ homes, ordering them to appear before the board to prove their residency or lose their voting rights. Many Black voters stayed home in the next election, intimidated by the situation, according to residents.
Civil rights groups sued, and in 2018, Hancock County agreed to a federal consent decree. The county eventually restored eligible voters to the rolls. But the damage lingered.
With a diminished Black vote, a white candidate, Allen Haywood, won the mayoral race for the first time in 32 years. Several residents, including white landowners, told Capital B they are skeptical of Haywood’s ties with Tarbutton. Since the project was proposed, Haywood has thrown his full support behind the process.
“We are actively trying to revive the local economy that continues to suffer from job loss and a dwindling population,” Haywood told the PSC in support of the railroad, saying it would have a “positive impact” on the local economy. Notably, Haywood is the director of Hancock County’s development authority.
In an email response to Capital B, Haywood said that “no party involved paid me for my time, travel expenses, meals, etc. when I spent two days attending PSC hearings.”
He added that he believes the attorneys supporting the Smith family and other impacted landowners have an “agenda.”
“Attorneys representing a few property owners, who are involved with the spur’s route, are mostly doing so pro-bono. Not sure what their agenda is, but they have one,” he wrote.
After spending the morning picking pecans, Bennie Clayton said he feels like “[Mayor Haywood] is in with Tarbutton” for personal reasons. “We just know those in power haven’t been for us.”
“To think we’re in this fight now after all of that,” Janet Smith said. “This is the reality of Black history.”
But she also wondered aloud why it remains that way.
Eminent domain and Georgia’s big donors
Tarbutton is the finance chairman of U.S. Rep. Mike Collins’ Senate campaign — and the family’s bankroll is uniquely large compared to landowners being impacted.
Since May 2022, Tarbutton donated nearly $40,000 to the campaign committees of the chair and vice chair of the PSC, the commission in charge of granting his railroad eminent domain status, $16,000 of which was donated after July 2025. The officials lost their reelection bids in November 2025.
A representative from the PSC told Capital B in response, “Such political donations have been reviewed by the courts countless times over the years with near universal rulings that donations are protected by the First Amendment as free speech. The law does not require recusal based solely on campaign contributions.”
Together with his father, Benjamin Tarbutton Jr., who died in 2020, the family has donated at least $860,000 to the campaigns of Georgia state and local politicians over the past 35 years. About 88% flowed to Republicans and 12% to Democrats, according to an analysis of data from Open Secrets, a nonprofit organization that tracks political donations.
Collins, the congressman Tarbutton helps raise money for, is in a position to shape how the government sees the necessity of eminent domain. He is a member of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, within which he is chair of the Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment. He has authored legislation to accelerate land taking and industrial expansion. His PERMIT Act, which passed the House in December 2025, strips key land and water considerations for industrial developments.
The bill, now in the Senate, would shorten the windows for legal challenges to projects and reduce federal oversight of projects affecting waterways, including projects like the Sandersville railroad and major pipelines.
The proposed railroad would cross two protected waterways. Tarbutton told Capital B that he has “not discussed the Sparta eminent domain case with Rep. Collins or his staff in an effort to seek intervention or support.” He added that the project “does not and will not require input at a federal level.”
“If the train wrecks, [the pollution] is going straight to the watershed,” said Don Garrett, an impacted landowner. “Once that happens, it is too late for us here.”
The bill, policy advocates from two environmental organizations said, may make eminent domain more likely. By stripping away environmental and legal requirements, Congress is eliminating the most effective legal strategy rural communities have to delay or derail projects before eminent domain gets exercised.
Passing the bill would “prevent public input on harmful projects that could impact our communities,” said Matthew Davis, vice president of federal policy at the League of Conservation Voters. “Our public lands, waters, health and communities are at risk. [This bill] could mean more pipelines, coal-fired power plants, and other projects polluting our air, water, and land.”
Advocates say what’s happening at the federal and state level with industrial development policies is a trend. “There’s an opportunity here to stop this pattern and practice of eminent domain extracting wealth from Black communities,” Rush said. “This is not happening in a vacuum.”
Representative Collins did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Generational wealth vs. generational survival
After emancipation, the Tarbutton wealth transformed.
In 1916, Tarbutton Sr. purchased the Sandersville Railroad. Then he became mayor of Sandersville, which borders Sparta, and eventually a member of both the Georgia House and Senate.
A decade later, James Smith would purchase the 600 acres of land in neighboring Hancock County by trading his share of a cotton harvest earned through sharecropping.
Seemingly, these two families, just two generations removed from slavery, now had the ability to build generational wealth. But only one family’s wealth would compound.
The Smith land fed neighboring Black families for free during the Depression, was used to teach children in the community to farm and fish through segregation, and anchored the area through civil rights and beyond.
“The family was never extremely wealthy, but the land gave them, and now us, life,” Janet Smith said. “We’re not senators or governors or doctors or lawyers. The land is our livelihood, it’s our solace.”
Elizabeth West, a professor at Georgia State University whose Data Mining and Mapping Antebellum Georgia project traces enslavers and the enslaved through property records, said the Tarbutton-Smith story is not rare.
Tarbutton acknowledged his family’s past, calling slavery “abhorrent.” He added: “I am not aware that any slaveholding by my ancestors made any material contribution to Sandersville Railroad or my family’s current economic status.”
But in Georgia there are “repeated examples” of wealth born from slavery connected to rural power today, West said.
“It’s pretty astounding,” she said. “When you start seeing the same people and names tied to geographical spaces and wealth, you begin to understand that certain paradigms of power in the South are as simplistic as we might imagine. They’re because of slavery.”
As thriving Black communities across central Georgia began evaporating, the Tarbutton name would come to mean political power as much as money.Tarbutton’s father expanded the family nationally, founding the Georgia Railroad Association and serving as a director of the American Shortline and Regional Railroad Association.
Today, Tarbutton has inherited it all: the railroad and the four-generation political network.In addition to running the railroad, Tarbutton has served on the Georgia Board of Regents and as chairman of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce. Today, he sits on the Georgia Ports Authority, which oversees over 10% of the state’s economy — an appointment made directly by Gov. Brian Kemp.
After passing the PERMIT Act, Collins thanked the Georgia Chamber of Commerce and the Georgia Ports Authority for their support. The Georgia Chamber of Commerce and the Georgia Ports Authority did not respond to requests for comment by publication.
The real cost of Tarbutton’s railroad
From the start, Sandersville Railroad’s petition turned on a promise of economic progress that many local residents say has never added up. In filings and testimony, the company portrayed the Hanson Spur as a lifeline for Sparta and Hancock County, projecting more than $1.5 million a year in “economic benefits.” At a Public Service Commission hearing, Sandersville’s representatives repeated that figure, framing the spur as a rare development opportunity in a rural county that has seen decades of disinvestment and is regarded as the poorest in the state.
But under oath, when regulators pressed for details, Tarbutton acknowledged he would not hire a single new operating employee to run the trains on the new line. Instead, he pointed to the quarry, suggesting it would add up to a dozen jobs at salaries of about $90,000 a year. The quarry’s owner later undercut that claim, testifying that any new workers would earn closer to $24 to $28 an hour — decent wages, residents noted, but far from the $90,000 jobs that had been held out as part of the project’s upside.
To bolster its case that the spur would serve the broader public, Sandersville also pointed to five small businesses it said would use the line, including one company that Sandersville Railroad solely owns through its LLC.
A representative from this company, Southern Chips, which provides wood chips to pulp and paper mills, told Capital B they plan to utilize the railroad if it is built and that Sandersville Railroad is the sole transporter of their products.
What’s more, under cross‑examination, three of the five business owners, including representatives from the quarry and Southern Chips, testified that they did not actually need the rail line to keep operating, raising questions about whether the Hanson Spur was truly indispensable to local commerce.
On the ground, the families facing condemnation struggle to square those promises with what the spur would mean for their lives. The seizure would bisect eight working farms, creating what one farmer calls “a glass wall” across the property: you can see the other side, but you can’t get over there. Tarbutton’s company has proposed building a single 25‑foot crossing on each property — a narrow gap that residents say is nowhere near enough for people who need to move tractors, combines, and livestock back and forth across their land.
For some politicians and business leaders, the spur fits neatly into a familiar story about industrial expansion and “economic development” in rural Georgia. For the families in Hancock County, it does not.
For the Claytons, there is no other place for them to call home.
“We have to stay here,” Eloise said.
As Smith put it, quoting her late father: “They don’t make any more land. When it’s gone, it’s gone.”
When asked by Capital B if he thought companies whose origins may be tied to slavery have any specific obligations today, Tarbutton said, “Regrettably, I cannot change what happened generations ago.”
“My family, and the other Tarbuttons of my generation, however, are responsible for how we lead today,” he added.
But Blocker can’t help but think about the resolve of her great-grandmother, whose voice and stories she still remembers — a woman who went from enslaved to landowner.
“This is a thriving Black community, has been for approximately 200 years,” she said. “Some don’t care if it continues to be.”