Phillip Perkins drove up to the old Bona Allen tannery Thursday to see what was left.
In 1981, the last time the Buford leather business burned, Perkins was one of the first volunteer firefighters on the scene. The towering inferno was too much to handle, he said. By then, the leather business had waned, but the fire spelled the end.
Tuesday, the remaining part of the mid-century tannery building — it held Bona Allen’s tanning vats as well as its shipping offices — was decimated by flames. A plumbing business that had offices in the East Moreno Street building was in the process of vacating the property, but the tannery was otherwise empty.
The tannery was where hides became leather, helped along by vats of chemicals. It was set off the road, overgrown and in poor repair — in contrast to the old saddle factory downtown, or the Tannery Row buildings that are now an artists’ colony. Though the tannery and other Bona Allen buildings were once the hub of life in Buford, this building had been largely forgotten for many years.
“It’s been so far removed from being an integral part of the community,” Perkins said. Still, he said, “any time another part of history in Buford is gone, it’s a sad day.”
The cause of the fire is undetermined, said Capt. Tommy Rutledge, spokesman for Gwinnett County’s Department of Fire and Emergency Services.
Watching this fire, he said, was “eerily the same” as the last tannery blaze.
Old-timers like former Gwinnett County chairman Wayne Hill remember well when Bona Allen, which started in 1873, was a force in Buford. Hill’s grandfather retired from the saddle factory, where workers made the saddles for the cast of Bonanza and other TV, movie and rodeo stars. Hill remembered seeing the Western stars Gene Autry and Lash LaRue come to town, where they performed at the local movie theater.
“The Allens had a big impact on the whole area,” he said. “People don’t understand where Gwinnett County came from. We were rural, very rural. Anything like that was a big deal for a bunch of kids.”
Until the 1960s, Buford was the largest city in Gwinnett. Hill said Bona Allen “set the stage for Gwinnett County.”
Throughout Buford, the Bona Allen factory whistle set the pace for the city, Dorsey Stancil recalled. Stancil, the executive director of the Buford Housing Authority and author of two books on vanishing Gwinnett, said the leather business made Buford Depression-proof. People from all over the country came for jobs. The company even fielded a baseball team, the Shoemakers, that in 1938 won the semi-pro World Series before disbanding for World War II.
But the Allen family sold to a larger corporation in the 1960s, and the business slowed, then disappeared.
“They were almost everything,” Stancil said. “Since the fire in ‘81, this is just a relic. …What was here was big and wonderful. Now, it’s going.”
Lynn A. Bowman, curator of the Museum of Buford, said that, when the Allens were in charge, Buford was a one-family town. The Buford area had its own sheriff, and jail, so workers being bailed out after a weekend of debauchery wouldn’t miss a day of work. It almost became the county seat of a new county, Bowman said.
Bowman felt the need to take pictures of the former tannery, so he drove over Wednesday to document the loss. Though the economic impact will be minimal, Bowman said it was “very sad to see the haze of smoke trapped between buildings” downtown.
“It’s a forgotten part of a landmark,” he said. “People who moved in never knew the history.”
Indeed, Tabitha Keys said she and her friends spent part of the week speculating on Facebook about what, exactly, had burned. Keys moved to Georgia in 1991, a decade after the leather maker ceased operation. On Thursday, she walked into the museum, asking questions about the building. If Keys was upset about the loss, it was because she was disappointed the tannery could no longer be re-purposed into something useful.
“People had no idea there was a derelict building in the woods,” Bowman said. “This building was kind of already forgotten about. It had already died.”
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