The Brown and Green families lived on farms a short distance south of Norcross in the early days of the 20th century. Messina Adolphus (“Dolph”) Brown and Margaret Arminda (“Mindy”) Miller married in 1878, and spent much of their lives raising four children on a 100 acre farm near the intersection of Holcomb Bridge and Crooked Creek Roads.
A stone’s throw away James Creighton Green and his wife Emma Kirkland Green and their 13 children {and a number of tenant farmer families) farmed a larger section of land.
Their eldest child, daughter Nora, was 30 years old when her youngest sibling was born.
The Brown’s oldest son, Robert, married Nora around 1907 and carried on both families’ farming tradition.
Creighton Green’s grandson Herbert Green, who lived and worked on their farm in the 1920s and 1930s, remembered the many tasks required to keep the farm going – including planting, growing and picking crops such as cotton, corn and beans, and running machines including a cotton gin, thrasher and syrup mill.
Children in that area attended the Mechanicsville elementary school, which was located in a small wooden building near today’s Bethel Baptist Church on Buford Highway. Two of the Green daughters later taught at the school, which was consolidated into Norcross Elementary around 1939.
