Hear, Here! Augustus "Gus" Coggins — Triumph, Scandal, and Survival in 1920s Cherokee County

Augustus "Gus" Coggins (1868–1952) built and lost one of Cherokee County's most ambitious enterprises in the span of two decades. From the stone barn at Crescent Farm — Georgia's only surviving stone barn, built in 1906 — to the magnificent
Edgewater Hall (1917), to bank president and breeder of the world-class racehorse Abbedale, Coggins' rise traced the arc of a generation. Then, on Friday, November 5, 1926, he took out a $62,000 loan against his farm. By the following Wednesday, his
bank had failed; he had declared bankruptcy; he had paid $25,000 to a mule-trading family from his birth county in Georgia, then in East St. Louis; and he had disappeared from Cherokee County for good.
This presentation examines four questions that the historical record has never fully resolved:
1. Did Coggins burn his own barn in 1915, when 162 mules perished but only his prize racehorse Sledmer was rescued?
2. Was his November 1926 exit a calculated escape with a planned soft landing, or an honest failure caught in the regional banking collapse that took down twenty percent of Southeastern banks?
3. Did he maintain his elite Cherokee County relationships — including with the R.T. Jones family— for decades after fleeing?
4. How did a bankrupt fifty-eight-year-old support an affluent lifestyle for fifteen years while being missing from every US Census between 1930 and 1950?
Drawing on research by Kenneth H. Wheeler and Jennifer Lee Cowart, primary documents, hotel registers, and the recently-released 1950 Census, Dr. Dobson argues that Coggins was a sophisticated operator who engineered his own escape — and
whose eventual resort to manual labor in Wray, Colorado in 1942 closes a story still being investigated nearly a century later.
Dr. Jeff Dobson is a native of Cherokee County. He attended Macedonia, Clayton, and Canton Elementary Schools, and graduated from Cherokee High School in 1963. He
attended Emory University and graduated from Reinhardt College (now Reinhardt University) and the University of Georgia, where he holds a PhD in Geography. He served as a Lieutenant in the US Navy. He taught at the University of Georgia, the Ohio
State University, the University of Illinois, and the University of Alaska, and served as Principal Geographer for the environmental assessment of the MX Missile System.
Since 1982 he has founded technology companies in global finance, data communications, public safety, and artificial intelligence. He currently serves as CEO of Mi Amigos AI Corporation in Knoxville. He is the author of the novel The Waters of Chaos (Admiralty Press, 2012) — a historical novel set against a real-world global catastrophe ten thousand years ago — and the screenplays O Brothers, Let's Go Down! and Sinking Creek. He has written more than fifty songs including Coggins on the Run! He served as Alderman of the Town of Farragut, Tennessee, from 1984 to 1993. In 2013 he was honored as Reinhardt University’s Most Distinguished Alumnus. He has served on the Board of Trustees of Reinhardt since 2016. In his career he has worked in 38 countries, traveled to 60, and visited all seven continents.