'We were all farmers' —Thomas Ewing, 96, remembers Snellville’s rural roots
Of the rolling fields and orchards of Thomas Ewing’s boyhood, memories remain. “I can go down the road and name you the farmers, from the church on down the road, and right up the road, the ones that was farming during that time,” Ewing says. “We were all farmers.” It was 1930. The previous year the stock market had crashed, and Americans were losing faith in their banks, in their president, in the possibilities of their country. In the midst of the tumult Ewing was born in a four-room farmhouse his grandfather built on Webb Gin House Road. Briefly, the family moved to Atlanta to try a different life. They were driven back by the worsening depression, and remained on the family farm another two and a half decades. Ewing himself would not stay even that long. He enlisted, and at 20 he left Gwinnett. Never again would he pick cotton, or plow a field. By the time he returned home to Snellville, 46 years later, everything had changed. A country crossroad had grown to a metro suburb. Ewing had traveled the world, and become director of his division. But for the son of a farmer raised in his father’s
