Ralph L. Spencer
In 1632 four brothers Thomas, John, William and Jared Spencer left England for America and settled in New England. These four brothers possessed one of the most famous names in English history that of Spencer. Prior to 1900, the Spencers settled primarily in the county of Middlesex in Connecticut. Most of them were seafaring people.
Ralph Lincoln Spencer was born on July 17, 1859 in Essex, Middlesex County, Connecticut. His parents were Chauncey and Temperance L. Spencer. While Ralph was educated in the public schools of Essex and in the Morgan School at Clinton, Connecticut, his father worked as a carpenter and contractor.
At the young age of fourteen years, R.L. Spencer became employed in one of the manufacturing establishments which were quite numerous in the New England area of that day.
Evidently, the roving nature of his seafaring ancestors was a part of his nature as well. After five years of working in the factory, his business attentions turned elsewhere. For twenty years, he was engaged in mining and oil enterprises located in Arizona, Colorado and California, as well as industrial development in the South.
In 1880 Spencer was married in Essex, Connecticut to Miss Lillie S. Buckingham. The following year in 1881, the Spencers became the parents of a son and named him Joseph Hawley Spencer.
In late 1886, the Spencer family arrived in Tallapoosa, Georgia where he spent time in a variety of business ventures. It is Ralph L. Spencer who is credited for creating the late nineteenth century boom in Tallapoosa, Georgia.
In a 1904 edition of Prominent and Progressive Americans, it was written that Mr. Spencer “has always been a ‘money raiser,’ and has been a leader among his associates. His temperament is aggressive and optimistic, and his belief is that will and work will overcome any obstacle. His friendships and his enmities are both marked with positiveness and intensity, no intermediate or indifferent ground being possible to him.
Records indicate that Ralph Lincoln died on February 5, 1916. Below is an excerpt of an obituary.
A descendant of early 17th century Norman English settlers of New England, R L Spencer was born in Essex, Middlesex Co., Connecticut to a humble carpenter-contractor. After a primary school education, he worked in a piano factory at age 14. By the end of his teens he entered a successful, multi-decade business career, which started in mail-order retailing and culminated with extensive involvement in oil and mining throughout North America. He is also remembered in exurban Atlanta as the chief developer of Tallapoosa, which ultimately failed to reach its one-time presumed destiny as the next Birmingham. Spencer's preeminent ability was as a persuasive money-raiser, but he lived in a sequestered and publicly modest way for a man of his presumed great wealth. Critics would bitterly question his honesty more than once, but as best we know, he was never successfully prosecuted. By 1904, he was so important that the "New York Tribune" profiled him along with a mere 110 other men, in a book titled: "Prominent and Progressive Americans: an encyclopedia of contemporaneous biography."
Burial was in Oak Grove Cemetery in Falmouth, Barnstable County, Massachusetts, USA. Plot number is unknown.
Beginnings of Tallapoosa
Using a promotional broadside map for land for sale in Tallapoosa, Georgia, utilized by the notorious promoters of the Georgia-Alabama Investment and Land Company as part of a massive investment fraud perpetrated on northerners.
Tallapoosa began as a gold mining town during America's first Gold Rush in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. Although other names were used to refer to it in its early years (Pine Grove, Pineville, and Possum Snout), a Tallapoosa post office was established in 1839. Tallapoosa got its name from the nearby river of that name. (Tallapoosa is an Indian word of uncertain meaning.) Incorporated in 1860, less than a quarter of a century later it entered an extraordinary boom period during which it became known to investors and tourists throughout the North and Canada as a "Yankee City Under a Southern Sun." The primary promoter was Ralph L. Spencer.
During its boom period, Tallapoosa was promoted heavily in New England, and many new industries, including Wine making, Glassworks, Iron Casting, Broom Manufacturing, Sash & Door Blind manufacturing, Furniture, Cabinetry, Knitting, Emery Wheels, Fruit Canning, and Dynamite manufacturing. Perhaps most notable was the establishment of a planned community for the purpose of wine making. Ralph Spencer invited some of Pennsylvania's Hungarian immigrants to leave their mining jobs and relocate to 2,000 acres near Tallapoosa, where they could produce wine. Led by their priest, Father Francis Janishek, 200 families accepted Spencer's invitation. They planted vineyards and established wineries in the Hungarian Colony they named "Budapest." Their success with viticulture attracted other groups from around the country, many of whom established their own vineyards and wineries. Most notable among these were about 200 families of Slovakian origin who established a community called Nitra three miles north of Tallapoosa. Just as the vintners began to flourish, Georgia passed the Prohibition Act of 1907, effectively ruining the industry.
The promotion of Tallapoosa turned out to be a massive land fraud, with the primary perpetrators, including Spencer, Benjamin Butler and R.A. Osgood and and George Stuart. The Georgia-Alabama Land and Invesment Company turned out to be a massive fraud, with over 15,000 investors losing their capital. Among other things, the promoters used a birdseye view of Brockton, Massachusetts in promoting the town, changing the name to Tallapoosa to show the prospects of their booming metropolis. By late 1891, the scheme had collapsed and C.A. Norton was appointed receiver to unwind the affairs of the company.