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Tennille was initially created as Station 13 on the Central Rail Road and Canal Company as it was built from Savannah, arriving in Macon in 1843. The Washington County seat and established City of Sandersville was bypassed four miles to the south, some say because Sandersville did not want the railroad with its hazards and noise. In the coming decades, there were second thoughts about that decision, as those four miles were covered by two competing railroads: the Sandersville and Tennille in 1876 and the Sandersville Railroad in 1894. The S & T later became the Georgia and Florida, and survived until 1934. The Sandersville Railroad grew with the kaolin industry to become one of the most successful short line railroads in the US.
In 1883 the Wrightsville and Tennille Railroad arrived, making Tennille the center of four railroads radiating five lines from the city. Tennille thus established its importance as the commercial center of the surrounding area, with direct passenger, express and freight trains to Savannah, Augusta, Macon and Atlanta.
The downtown area was covered with a network of tracks from which the four railroads served warehouse collection and distribution points. As well as the wholesale warehouses, there was a full complement of retail and service facilities, such as drug and grocery stores, at least three banks, a large hotel, and restaurants. There was light industry, such as a bottling works.
The Wrightsville and Tennille Railroad and the Sandersville Railroad became nationally famous in the post World War II era for being quaint steam powered relics of a time past. Writers and photographers such as Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg wrote about and photographed them to a world wide audience of rail fans.
The Wrightsville and Tennille office building, built in 1903, looks very much as it always has, and across the tracks is the 1869 Central Rail Road freight depot, now owned by the City and undergoing restoration as a museum and cultural center.
That this depot building was constructed in 1869 is telling of the post Civil War reconstruction period. Tennille is the crossroads of two Civil War trails: the Sherman’s Marchto the Sea and Jefferson Davis Heritage Trails, with an interpretive sign planned at the Depot. Sherman essentially destroyed all the rail facilities at Tennille, his soldiers heating and bending the iron rails around trees, which some older residents claim to have still been there in the surrounding woods when they were children.
The W & T building is one of seven Charles E. Choate designed and built structures in the City, the Tennille Baptist Church also being of particular note among these. The church sanctuary is particularly unique and impressive for its offset orientation, decorative ceiling, and roll down partitions.
In the automobile age, Tennille continued to be an area commercial center, with at least ten active automobile service stations from the 1910’s to World War II, an amazing number of service facilities for so small a town.
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