Pike County Man Killed In Motorcycle Accident

A Sunday morning accident on Old Alabama Road claimed the life of a Pike County man and critically injured his son.The accident occurred at 10:45 am, about two miles west of Roland Road.

Tommy Sparrow, Sr. (63) of Zebulon and Tommy Sparrow, Jr. (43) of Hampton, Georgia were riding their motorcycles west bound toward Sprewell Bluff State Park.

According to the Georgia State Patrol a red Chevrolet Silverado extended cab pickup traveling east bound out of the park, lost control, crossed the center line and struck the two motorcycles head-on.

Tommy Sparrow, Sr. was pronounced dead at the scene, Tommy Sparrow, Jr. was life-flighted to the Macon Medical Center in critical condition.

The driver of the pickup, 45 year old Marcus G. Moore of Kingsland, Georgia was not injured.

Alcohol related charges are pending against him.

The Upson County Sheriff’s Department and Upson EMS responded to the scene.

Old Alabama Road was closed to all traffic for over three hours.

Hot Spot Will Rebuild

“It was a dark and stormy night.”

The opening line to many horror stories would have been very appropriate as the midnight hour approached Wednesday night. Customers stopping by the Hot Spot on U.S. 41 north of Barnesville, talked nervously about the weather that had taken many lives earlier in the day. Little did they know, they were about to live through their own horror story.

The occasional lightning flash to the west grew more intense with every passing moment.

The hillside across the road limited the view to just a few hundred yards of pine trees surrounding a church.

Around 12:45, there were a couple of cars at the fuel pumps and several more parked out front, when everything went dark. The constant lightning over the hill made the quarter mile wide funnel cloud clearly visible.

All but one customer scrambled into the store, she sat frozen in her car. A man rushed back out and pulled her from the car and into the store just seconds before the wind and debris began shredding the place.

Eleven people huddled in the drink cooler as the EF-3 twister roared through the aisles.

In less than 90 seconds, it was over.

Everyone survived and physically were fine, psychologically they had endured what will likely be the most intense moment of their lives.

The owner told TGA news that he intends to rebuild in the same location and hopes to be open for business again in three months.

The view across the road, in both directions, will be very different.

For more pictures, click here.

Grove Street

Usually a news story is straight forward, just the facts. Occasionally something occurs that makes you stop in your tracks and wonder if it’s fact or fiction.

The residents along Grove Street had very little warning that a deadly monster of a tornado was about to unleash it’s 140 mile per hour fury in the middle of the night. Most had gone to bed Wednesday evening knowing that two hundred miles to the west the death toll had been heavy along the “Dixie Alley” storm track, but it didn’t include their little hamlet in middle Georgia. None of the old timers could remember a really bad tornado striking Lamar County.

Only a hand full were old enough to remember, and some had been told by their parents about the events of April 6th, 1936. That morning the city of Gainesville, Georgia, 110 miles to the north, awoke to dark threating skies.

A young boy by the name of Elvis Presley, and his mother, had survived a powerful tornado that killed 233 of their neighbors in Tupelo, Mississippi the day before and now the same ominous skies greeted the sunrise in Hall County.

Around 8:30 that morning two tornados descended, one plowing up Atlanta Highway and the other along the Dawsonville Highway. The two merged into one deadly twister that killed 203 and left 40 that were never accounted for after some of the destroyed buildings burned.

The street in Gainesville where, 75 years ago, the two merged to become the deadliest killer in Georgia history……Grove Street.