To the Metropolis (Georgia, 1890-1910)

Small-Town Boy Makes Good
Grady Voil Webb and his siblings represent several significant shifts in Webb family history. The five children who lived to adulthood--Voil, Gertrelle, Blondine, Gilder and Alton--all were born in a small town, but Voil and Gilder moved to big cities (Atlanta and Philadelphia), while Blondine and Gertrelle were he first to go to college. And from a family that had been signing its papers with an "X" came not only the initial signs of education, but also of artistic creativity.
Voil and twin sister Vella were the first children of Americus Stephens and Martha Lucinda Wills Webb, arriving in February 1888 in Harmony Grove, Ga. Vella died one year later. Next to be born was Gilder Webb in September 1889, Blondine Webb in April 1891, Cymenthia Webb in 1895 (she died in 1896), Gertrelle Webb in November 1896, and Alton Americus Webb in 1904.
It's uncertain how long Voil's education lasted; son Robert S. Webb believes Voil didn't get beyond grade school in Commerce (it's unlikely the town had a high school at the turn of the last century) and might have supplemented his learning by attending night school-type classes at Georgia Tech once he moved to Atlanta. It's not quite known how he settled on a career, but we do know that by the time of the 1910 census he was listing his profession as bricklayer. Not long after, he moved to Atlanta and quickly saw his life change.

Toccoa Stop
Voil lost his father in 1909, when he was 21. Just a year before, northeast of Commerce on the railroad line, a 15-year-old girl lost her mother and quickly saw her life change, too. Her name was Annie Richard Stephens.
Annie was the fifth of six children of James Cannon Stephens and Sarah Haygood. Family tales say James' real name was James O'Cannon and that he was adopted by the Stephens family. But census records suggest his family had lived in the South since at least the late 1700s, when a man named Cannon Stephens was born in North Carolina. (That's logical if the name Stephens turns out to be Scottish in origin. Many Scots emigrated to North Carolina after Bonnie Prince Charlie's failed uprising in 1745. Stephens also is a popular English name.)
Records suggest Cannon moved to South Carolina, where eldest son Warren W. Stephens was born, and then to Georgia, where several other sons arrived. Sometime in the mid-1850s, Warren married a Tennessee-born woman named Margaret and, in September 1858, the couple welcomed James Cannon Stephens into the family. The child joined with father and grandfather to move again a few years later, this time to Dahlonega, the former gold-strike capital that by the 1870s suffered from played-out veins. Warren kept the family fed by working as a butcher.
Sometime during the 1870s, James Cannon Stephens took a job as a conductor with what became the Southern Railway. One day while stopping at cooling station that became the town of Toccoa, the story goes, he alighted from the train, saw a girl named Sarah Haygood and immediately was smitten.
Those familiar with family stories say the Haygoods were Cherokee Indians and thus we all have some Indian blood in us. That's possible, because Toccoa is located just east of the Cherokee lands (Catawbas actually were the tribe that live near Toccoa.) However, the 1870 census that shows Sarah, her mother and likely grandmother list all three as white. But that might be so because Indians in Georgia were keeping a low profile in those days; after all, the "Trail of Tears" in which Cherokees were forced out of their homeland and forced to move west had taken place just a few decades before.
James Cannon Stephens was only about 19 and Sarah Haygood only 16 or 17 when they first met. They married in 1878, settling in Toccoa. Their first child, Warren Floyd, was born in 1878. Next came Addie Elizabeth ("Lizzie") in October 1879, followed by Maggie in 1885, Pauline in 1888, Art ("Artie") in 1891, Annie Richard in March 1893, and James in 1897.
Like Voil, Annie grew up in a small, freshly minted mining town. Toccoa had been incorporated only three years before James and Sarah were married.
Then, sometime between 1897 and 1908, Annie's mother died; family legend says it was from tuberculosis.
At this point, James Cannon Stephens did a curious thing. Sometime between 1908 and 1910, it appears that he handed over his entire family to be cared for by daughter Lizzie, who in 1903 had married a man named George Leonard Tarrant and who was living in Atlanta. James Cannon Stephens then moved to Spartanburg, where he stayed a widower for fewer than two years. He married Mary Magdalene Harrill McNamary, and on Feb. 1, 1911, she gave birth to a son named David Lemond Stephens. Three months later, James Cannon Stephens was dead.
The news probably was delivered to 152 Ormond St. in Atlanta, where eight people resided, Leonard and Lizzie Tarrant; their son, Harry; and Lizzie's siblings Maggie, Pauline, Artie, Annie and James Stephens. According to the 1910 census, Maggie was a seamstress, Pauline and Annie worked as milliners at a wholesale hatmaking establishment, Artie was a saleslady at a dry good store, and James was in school. (Annie, aged 16, had just entered the workforce after having been in school all of 1909.) The Stephens, now bereft of parents, were finding their way in the big city. Soon Voil Webb would, too.