By Eric Curl
May 22, 2025 – A vacant structure fire kept the Savannah Fire Department busy through Saturday afternoon into the next morning at the former Dixie Plywood property at 204 West Old Lathrop Avenue, where one of the country’s largest sales of enslaved people, known as the Weeping Time, occurred in the 19th century.
The fire began at about 2 p.m. and destroyed the remnants of a former office building at the 30-acre site, according to the fire report. The fire was reportedly under control shortly after 4 p.m., although the last unit did not clear the scene until around 3 a.m. the next morning. Constructed in 1987, the office building had an assessed value of about $780,000, according to the property record. The fire report does not state a cause of the blaze.
The site continues to sit vacant and unused after Dixie Plywood sold the property in 2022 for more than $30 million to a shipping container transportation company, Tennessee-based IMC Logistics, as previously reported.
As of Thursday morning, the company had not yet responded to a request made Tuesday for comment about the fire and any pending plans for the property.
In November 2023, a company spokesperson said that IMC was still determining plans for the site.
“Our industry is experiencing a freight recession and we have paused much of our new spending,” Chief Marketing Officer Katie George Hooser said at the time. “As we assess our options, we remain committed to being good citizens of Savannah and stewards of its history and plan to engage all stakeholders involved if the time comes to develop the property.”
A city commissioned archaeological resources survey in 2021 found that the site is the location the former Ten Broeck Race Course, where more than 400 enslaved men, women and children were auctioned off in 1859. Named for the families that were torn apart and the heavy rain that accompanied the two-day auction, the Weeping Time is currently memorialized with a historical marker at a small park on Augusta Road about half a mile away from where the tragedy occurred.
In 2024, Georgia legislators passed HB 1425 to create the Weeping Time Cultural Heritage Corridor Authority, which is charged with preserving the memory and heritage of the Weeping Time tragedy and corridor, as reported by the Savannah Tribune.
The site’s previous owner, Dixie Plywood and Lumber Company (DIXIEPLY) has operated out of Savannah since 1945 after Waldo Bradley founded the company in Atlanta in 1944, according to 2022 a trade magazine article. In 2019 the company became 100% employee owned and the wholesale distributor’s headquarters is now at 100 Riverview Drive, with 11 locations across the southeast, according to its website. The founder’s son, Daniel Howard Bradley, died this past December in Savannah at age 85 after serving for more than 56 years as the company’s president, according to his obituary.
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