PINE MOUNTAIN, GA-- The story of John Wallace Road ends on a sparsely traveled, five mile stretch of asphalt that winds through rural Meriwether county. The story starts with weathered scrapbooks that chronicle the life of the road's most prominent resident – a roughneck 1940s era bootlegger named John Wallace.
"Sixty something years later, he's still respected," said Bruce O'Neal, Public Works director of Meriwether County.
John Wallace was respected as a county kingpin. Historians say he controlled local politicians and funded local churches with money from illegal liquor. That stretch of asphalt on which he lived is a modern-day memorial, named for the liquor lord.
"Our deed when we bought the house says John Wallace Road," said Reba Crisp, who lives at the southern end of the road.
"All my life it's always been john Wallace road," said O'Neal.
Wallace still has kinfolk who live in the area, known in the 40s as "the kingdom." Mike Strickland, the grandson of Wallace's cousin and now lives where Wallace lived. "He looked after his own," Strickland said.
In 1948, things turned ugly on Wallace's farm when a man named Wilson Turner was arrested for stealing two of Wallace's cows. When Turner was released from the old jailhouse in Greenville, he drove off, up US highway 27. Wallace and two other men followed him to the Coweta County line and killed Turner.
It became a book and TV movie called Murder in Coweta County. The swaggering Wallace was played by Andy Griffith. The man who arrested him, played by Johnny Cash, was Coweta County sheriff Lamar Potts. A Coweta County jury sent John Wallace to Georgia's electric chair in 1950.
"He wasn't framed. He was just doing what anyone else would have done at the time," Strickland said.
Mike Strickland says John Wallace's fate was sealed when the cow thief he was chasing made it out of Meriwether County, where the kingpin's influence stopped.
"That man came back here and stole both his dairy cows. You think he needed doing away with?" Strickland asked 11Alive's Doug Richards, who responded by suggesting that Wallace's homicidal response was "harsh."
Strickland disagreed. "No it wasn't harsh in that day. Man, you're talking about 1949. "Everybody wore two pistols on their hip. Need to get back that way today!"
The essential facts aren't in dispute: that john Wallace killed a man, that the state of Goergia executed him for it, and that the road is named for a condemned killer—raising, perhaps, an obvious question.
"Has the county ever considered naming the road for somebody who was not executed for murder?" Richards asked county officials.
"No sir. Not to my knowledge," O'Neal said.
It's a community where its residents like Reba Crisp seem to embrace its dark history, and the killer behind the road.
"He was well liked. There were people that were afraid of him," said Crisp, who only knows Wallace through conversations she's had with a close friend of the killer who lived across the street. "Very intriguing."
"I would hope that it doesn't glorify him," said Arthur "Skin" Edge, the grandson of the Coweta County sheriff who arrested Wallace. Edge is a former state senator and now works as a lobbyist at the state capitol.
Edge is mostly untroubled by the road named for the killer.
"Maybe it's a good thing. Maybe it teaches people a lesson. And maybe the more they hear about it the more they learn about it, the more they realize that everyone is accountable under the law and should be," Strickland said.
In this rural community, the story ends with a curving stretch of road whose name has a certain twisted logic -- to honor a man whose residents say was more than a murderer.
