Mrs. Satterthwaite, please indulge my two cents worth on the history of the Sams and Busey doctors’ service to Fayette County (and Clayton County).
I’m almost 73 years young, and a “refugee” from Clayton for over a dozen years now.
Dr. Busey, Sr. was our family doctor, having assisted my mother at my birth in our home in Jonesboro (house calls were common) in 1940. By the time my brother came along in 1942, Dr. Busey, Sr., had built his clinic in Fayetteville and Mother delivered little brother there.
For all the years of our childhood we came to see Dr. Busey, Sr., in his little white building (asbestos siding, I believe) which I remember being next door to the log cabin on South Glynn Street, where the AT&T building sits today.
Until Dr. Wells Riley opened shop in Jonesboro in the mid-1950s, we and many other Clayton residents depended on Dr. Busey, Sr.
Later, when Dr. Riley was on vacation, etc., the Samses saw his patients in Fayetteville.
Anyone who came to either county after about 1960 can’t possibly comprehend how relatively rural and economically interdependent the two counties were, and how much the pioneer families were intermarried or otherwise knew each other.
When the original counties were established, Jonesboro was in Fayette County, but that’s a whole ’nother tale.
Al Camp
Fayetteville, Ga.
