The Town Crier: Citizen George Glenn of Dalton

Published 2:00 pm Saturday, March 1, 2025

From an article in a Georgia History from 1917, I discovered the person of George Grant Glenn who was an active and involved citizen of Dalton.

He was born in Whitfield County in October of 1868, three years after the Civil War. His parents were Jesse and Eliza Crook Glenn. The grandparents were James and Maria Glenn. James Glenn was born in New York state, when, as a young man, he and two of his brothers headed out to make their fortunes. One went to Louisiana, one went out west where he was never heard from again, and James went to South Carolina and later moved to Georgia, just over in Chattooga County. James met his wife, a Georgia girl, here, and they had a son named Jesse. James was a teacher and his son Jesse also became a teacher.

Before the Civil War, Jesse was appointed judge of the Inferior Court of Chattooga County at the young age of 19. In 1852 he moved to the newly formed county of Whitfield.

At the start of the Civil War, Jesse helped raise a company of men, Company H, was voted its captain, and also helped organize the 36th Georgia Regiment (with four companies from Whitfield County). Like a lot of the units raised in this part of the country, the soldiers found themselves at Vicksburg during July of 1863.

Fighting battles to save Vicksburg and then finally surrounded and laid siege to, Jesse was wounded when a cannonball exploded near him. It blew off half his left hand and part of his left shoulder. These wounds made his left arm useless the rest of his life, but that didn’t hold him back.

At the back end of the war, after recuperating from his wounds, he was sent to Northeast Georgia to try and raise a brigade, but the war ended before it could be of use. He received his commission as a brigadier general after the war was actually over.

Later, much later, in 1898, he offered to help raise another company of soldiers for the Spanish-American War, but due to his age and infirmity, he was excused from service.

After the Civil War, in Dalton Jesse served four years as the postmaster and was involved in local politics. Like many in the mountains of Appalachia he was a Republican. In the post-war years he became a lawyer.

He and his wife had several sons. One was a noted lawyer in Atlanta, another the sheriff of Whitfield County, one was a farmer in Whitfield County but died at age 24, and another was killed in Dalton in some type of explosion at the age of 21. Their son George Glenn is the one we are looking at today.

George studied in the Dalton public school system, graduating from Dalton High and then starting studies to be a lawyer like his father and older brother. He passed the Georgia bar on Halloween 1889, served in Dalton at the start of his career and then in 1896 went to Atlanta to practice law with his brother. In 1902 he returned to Dalton and picked up where he’d left off.

After only a year back in Dalton he was elected to the state legislature as the representative from Whitfield, County. He served in this capacity several times, from 1902 to ’04, again in 1908 and ’09, and then was serving a third term in 1914, at the time the article was written from which this material is pulled.

There are a couple of interesting aspects to his legislative career. The multiple committees he served on during his 1903 term included General Judiciary, Western & Atlantic Railroad (the state of Georgia actually owns the rail line and leases it out!), Temperance, Penitentiary, University of Georgia and State Sanitarium.

The other aspect of his political career of note is that he was a joker. He would literally write up and submit “Freak Bills” to amuse. He put forth funny bills with no hope of passing, only of getting a laugh from folks who read it. And these silly bills would get picked up by the newspapers and magazines and published in New York and around the country.

The article doesn’t go into a lot of detail on the bills, but notes one was called The Rainbow Stocking Bill, and another had to do with mosquitoes, while a third was a bill to “legalize dances like the Tango and the Turkey Trot.” Perhaps his most notable legislative achievement was being elected as a Republican (the party of Lincoln and “free the slaves”) in a state that was solidly Democratic since before the Civil War.

George Glenn was renowned in our area at the time as someone who characterized the spirit of charity, good will and humanitarianism. He showed compassion for all the underdogs of society. These pluses of character came into conflict with how many wanted to utilize the letter of the law to make sure the status remained quo.

In 1910 Glenn was elected to a four-year term as judge of the City Court of Dalton. He gave the accused the benefit of the doubt, “tempered justice with mercy,” suspended sentences and reduced fines or got rid of them completely. This got a lot of the lawyers in town upset that things weren’t going like they usually did, especially if it wasn’t going good for their clients. The result was that after only one year with Glenn as judge, they got completely rid of the City Court. George G. Glenn saw it as a personal victory and he remained a popular member of the community.

Tracking down info beyond the article, The Town Crier discovered that he died in San Antonio, Texas, in 1927, aged 58. His body was returned to his home in Dalton where it’s interred in West Hill Cemetery.

Mark Hannah is a Dalton native who works in the film and video industry.