Articles have been edited by Suzanne Forte for brevity and to avoid mention of living individuals.

At age 96, Mrs. Essie Sorrels is probably the oldest person in Loganville.  She was born February 21, 1880 in Newton County and came to Loganville in 1900.

For thirty years she was a midwife in the Loganville area, and worked out of the Walton County Health Department.  The department presented her with a special medal when she retired.

Working with the late Dr. Floyd in Loganville, she estimates she "brought about 900 black and white babies into the world."

"People would come and pick me up in their buggies when it was time for the baby to be born.  One man came and got me but couldn't get his buggy across a creek so he carried me across it on his back," she continues.

"I got $7 - $20 for being a midwife.  If people didn't have any money they sometimes gave me peas or chickens."

Mrs. Sorrels lives next door to Essie's Cafe which she built in 1943.  She worked in the care until 1957 and loved to cook - especially potato custard pies and fried apple pies.

The house she lives in was built in 1904 by her and her first husband, Charlie Johnson, who died in 1939.  Her second husband, Luke Sorrels, died in 1945.

"When I came here in 1900, Loganville was a farming community, my husband and I farmed.  I've had a good life but always had to work hard," she says.

My grandmother, Easter Tucker, was a slave in Rockdale County.  My mother, who lived to be 98 wasn't a slave, but we had hard times.  We would catch birds under wide wooden traps and eat them when I was growing up."

"I went to school in Rockdale for a while and we had only one book for the whole class to use.  I always like to read and could read anything till about four years ago."

Mrs. Sorrels is a member of Mt. Zion Baptist Church and remembers when preachers Baxter and Taylor came from Atlanta to preach.

"Each person was to pay 25 cents at church.  Those were our dues, and we kept warm with a stove and cordwood."

Mrs. Sorrels, who has stayed active all her life, voted every time the polls were open until she was 93.

In conclusion Mrs. Sorrels said, "I don't know if I'll live to be 100 or not.  I've had a shortness of breath lately, but I've lived this long because I never drank, never smoked and never used snuff."