A local man’s letters have given University of Georgia students a chance to read the technological history of peanuts.

J. Frank McGill of Tifton, a Brooks distinguished professor emeritus and former peanut specialist for UGA, donated 41 volumes of letters and progress reports to the UGA main library.

The letters and technical reports come from more than three decades of correspondence between McGill and county agents across Georgia, dating back to the early 1950s. The letters and reports give readers a view of the history of peanuts and peanut technology as it changed over the years and average yields in Georgia rose from 800 to 3,000 pounds per acre.

“Thanks to Mr. Duncan McCluskey, librarian at UGA’s Tifton Campus,” McGill said. “He recognized the historic value of my 42 volumes of book-bound letters of personal correspondence from over 31 years of service. These volumes contain correspondence from every letter sent or received through the years.”

McGill said that he collected the letters he wrote and received into bound volumes as the years passed. At the time he started, it only cost about $3 to bind the letters. Each volume is inches thick and hundreds of pages long, containing numerous pieces of information.

He said that he did not know what to do with them until he told McCluskey about them. The librarian suggested that he donate them to the UGA library and McGill did. He donated 41 of the volumes — keeping one for his own memories.

“I never dreamed these letters would serve any useful purpose except for personal reflection in the rocking chair in my senior years,” said McGill. “I was pleased that they were old enough to find a place at the UGA library.”

Some of the letters were published in Georgia Peanut Growers magazine as “Peanut Re-runners from the files of J. Frank McGill.”

Some of the letters are humorous anecdotes, such as a 1955 letter from a county agent in Douglas and McGill’s response.

The agent asked if a certain type of herbicide could be used with a mule-drawn sprayer. McGill told him that he could use the herbicide with the mule by installing a pressure gauge regulator. Thirty-four years later, McGill began to wonder if the farmer installed the regulator to the sprayer or the mule.

Another letter told a county agent in 1955 that he could possibly find Virginia Bunch peanut seed from a peanut grower in Plains named Jimmy Carter, long before that farmer became Georgia’s governor and then president of the United States.



To contact reporter Dusty Vassey, call 382-4321, ext. 208.