The greatest man, mind and friend that I have ever known was my Dad, Toledo Parks "TP"
Burgess.  He was not fond of his name so he went by "TP" most of his adult life.  Daddy was
born on November 13, 1906, into the family of Raiford Ezzard (1873-1944) and Rosalee
Jamerson Wood Burgess(1885-1966).  Raiford and Rosalee lived on Francis Road in the
Hopewell Community of the current day city of Milton, Georgia.  "TP" was the oldest of three
children, Etrulia who died in 1922 at age 9, and Durand who died as an infant in 1911.  The
family lived near the Beehive school and as a preschooler Toledo used to slip off from home and
go to school.

Dad was not afraid to tackle anything, due in large part to his parents.  His Mother, Rosalee, was
a very talented country wife.  She could do as much as any and more than most housewives.  She
could sew, knit, crochet, cook, preserve food and run a household.  At the age of eight-one she
had a stroke in front of her wooden cook stove as she was canning food to be used in the
following winter.  She passed away shortly thereafter. 

Dad's father, Raiford, did some farming but his first love was mechanical things.  He with his
two brothers John and Warner had quite a mechanical setup on Francis Road.  The conglomerate
included a cotton gin, a sawmill, a corn mill and a pea thrasher.  The whole setup was operated
by a huge steam engine.  It was all operational in the 1910 time frame.  As soon as young "TP"
was able to do a days work, as a young teenager he learned all aspects of operating this
equipment.  In addition at about 15 years old the family needed a water well dug on their
property and Toledo was elected to be the man in the hole, which meant that he went down in the
well, dug out the dirt, filled the bucket, and called to those on the surface to let them know when
to haul up the dirt.  In the meantime before the empty bucket returned he was shaping and
smoothing the walls.  This well was finished at about 65 feet deep.  

"TP" was one of the few in the northern end of Milton County to obtain a high school diploma. 
His family had a car and he was allowed to drive to Milton County High School in Alpharetta for
his classes.  The was a trip of about eight miles one way.

Dad continued to work in the family business while in school.  After graduation he was offered a
position as a schoolteacher at the Birmingham Elementary School.  During this time he lived
with his mother's sister, Mintora McCurry and her husband Wade, in Birmingham.  That year
and the year he lived in Atlanta and worked for Sears and Roebuck were probably the two most
miserable years of his life from a work standpoint.  The good part of the two years was that he
learned that he wanted to be outside and not restricted in what he could do.  He went to work for
a man named William Thomas Wright who was very much like my Daddy.  Wright was not
afraid to try anything that was legal to make a living.  He farmed, he had a sawmill, he brought a
cotton gin, he boarded livestock for the Atlanta Ice Company, and he also had a country store that
his wife, Nettie, ran.

My Daddy and Ed Wright operated most all of William Thomas Wright's equipment.  Dad was
the sawyer at the sawmill which meant that he loaded the logs on the carriage, pulled the lever to
send them through the saw, and determined the size of the planks and boards to come off the
mill.  He and Ed operated the cotton gin located directly across Birmingham Road from Boiling
Springs Primitive Baptist Church.  

Daddy kept most of William Wright's equipment going including his trucks, tractors, etc.  In
return he paid "TP" a good wage and after my Mother and Daddy dated awhile, Wright gave him
his middle daughter, Estelle, as his wife.

After Granddaddy Wright's business started going down and his health started failing in the
1940's, my Dad started branching out on his own.  He renovated some of the equipment that both
his daddy, Raiford (Papa), and his father-in-law had turning plows, harrows, sub-soilers, a
combine, a grain thrash, two tractors, an International and a John Deere, to pull this equipment
with and hired Woodrow Blackwell as a full time employee.  In the decade of the 1940's very
little farm equipment other than mule and wagon was available to the individual farmer. 
Therefore, Daddy and Woodrow had plenty of work in the spring, preparing the ground for
planting and in the fall, harvesting grain.  

During this time Dad made one of his biggest mechanical mistakes.  Granddaddy Wright had an
old International truck that Daddy thought that he could gear down and use as a tractor.  He got
the gear ratios about right but he could not get the truck tires to develop the traction that he
needed for plowing in loose soil.

In the mid 1940's the cotton ginning business began to go the way of the boll weevil. 
Granddaddy Wright offered Daddy half interest in the gin to tear it down and prepare it to sell for
scrap.  This Daddy did and the gin, including the single piston engine, disappeared.

This was in the period at the end of World War II and soldiers were returning from the war.  Papa
Burgess has an old plaining mill that he had used as a stationary mill to dress lumber after it
came off his sawmill.  Daddy took this mill made of cast iron, that weighed severel tons, put it on
steel wheels, hooked it to the International tractor and down the road he went to locations that
newly released servicemen wanted to build houses.  This business dressed lumber for houses in
Cumming, Canton, Waleska, Alpharetta, Roswell, and all communities in between.  It continued
until the late 1950's and ended at a house for Roger Martin, in the area of the Manor subdivision
on Hopewell Road in the North section of the city of Milton.  

I mentioned earlier that originally Dad put steel wheels under this very heavy piece of machinery. 
That lasted for a couple of years when he allowed me, his son, to tow the plainer down Redd
Road to its intersection with Hopewell Road.  Turning right on Hopewell I got too close to the
edge of the intersection, got into sand, the plainer's weight shifted and the extreme weight
crushed the bottom of the wheel and turned it 90 degrees to the top part.  So I had created a
monster mass for my Dad.  He had a multi-ton hunk of cast iron lying in the middle of the road
that we too heavy to pick up, slide, roll or leave.  Dad's ingenuity came to the forefront and he
remembered the old International truck that he tried to turn into a tractor.  He pulled the truck
axle out , fixed the tires, extended the length of the axle so that it would be long enough to go
under the plaining mill and carried it to the site of the road blocking plainer.  There on the ground
with a series of blocks and jacks he lifted the plainer upon its new set of wheels.  After about a
three-day ordeal he had it ready to go on to the next job.  I don't remember if I was pulling the
load or not, but knowing my Dad I probably did.  He was a very forgiving person.

Dad dressed lumber for both Birmingham and Liberty Grove Baptist Churches and also some
smaller churches in the Canton Area.  I remember one church that was framed from 1x4 inch
boards (the smallest boards in existence at that time).  This took forever as I remember and
Daddy hardly covered expenses but he still gave a ten percent discount to the Lord's work, which
he always did.

During the time from the early 1940's until the mid 1960's Dad operated a contracted school bus
for Fulton County.  He ran the bus part of the time and hired someone part of the time.  This gave
him something to do in bad weather when it was raining and he couldn't work outside.  Dad
stayed busy all the time.  He worked for individuals doing most anything that needed to be done. 
His mother was his next-door-neighbor in one direction and his mother-in-law the same on the
other side.  He kept everything going for both of them. He did a lot of work for Hopewell Baptist
Church.  In 1949 the foot of our cemetery was washing away.  Many of the Deacons at that time
thought that a wall about 300 feet long and 4 to 6 feet high should be built around the base of the
cemetery.  A rock mason was not a common trade and no one seemed to know anyone that could
lay rock.  The deacon board knew Dad's reputation for tackling most any project so they asked
him about it.  He said that he had never laid any rock, but if they had enough faith in him to ask,
he would try.  He and Woodrow Blackwell started on the project.  They worked on it most of the
summer, and finished the wall at a cost of $853.92, This included rocks which were hauled from
Stone Mountain.  All of this was in the church records.  

Daddy did many other building projects at the church including building outdoor toilets, building
the outdoor table from marble hauled from Tate, Georgia, and cement blocks, building an
outdoor baptizing pool behind the church.  He also served on several building committees.  In
1952 Daddy along with Doyle Wilkie and Pierce McCleskey were elected as a committee to
remodel the church.  This project included both inside and outside renovation.  Supports were
installed inside the church enabling the center row of post to be taken out.  The ceilings were
lowered and the wood framing inside was replaced with celetex on the ceiling and sheet rock on
the sides. Stained glass windows were also installed.  The outside of the building included
bricking, building a porch on the front, installing a tower and bell, and putting in a central
heating system.

In 1948 Daddy and Mother decided to build a new house.  With money being tight and Daddy
wanting to do everything that he could on it himself he formulated a plan.  At that time we were
living in a small house directly in front of where they wanted to building their new house.  They
decided to put the front door of the new house about five feet behind the porch of the old house. 
With this plan in place Daddy decided to obtain his lumber himself.  There were some woods on
our property and Daddy and Woodrow Blackwell cut the timber that he thought they would need,
sawed it into logs and drug them to where he decided to set up a sawmill.  He still had a small
sawmill that Papa Burgess had used.  He hauled it in, set it up, and he and Woodrow saw and
stacked the lumber there on the property, They let it dry for a time and then brought the plaining
mill in and dressed the lumber.  It was then loaded on a wagon and hauled to the building site. 
Mother wanted hardwood floors and the widow lady behind the property had several large white
oak trees and needed some heavy timber to do some repair on her property., Daddy agreed to saw
up her trees if she would let him have enough to floor his house.  Daddy carried this flooring to
be kiln dried and Mother got her hardwood floor at very little expense.  

Daddy knew that he would not be able to completely frame the house with other things that had
to be done.  He hired two carpenters, Claude Lowery and Johnny Johnson to help do the
carpentry work.  When it was finished they kicked out the back door to the old house, put a ramp
from its back porch to the front door of the new house and carried the furniture from one to the
other and Mother carried the clothes without any of the belongings ever touching the ground.

There was one other major undertaking to this move.  Woodrow needed a house for his family
and he and Daddy decided to move our old house from it location in front of our new house on
Birmingham Road to a new location about 100 yards down Freemanville Road.  This move was
accomplished by jacking the house into the air, taking two rows of large beams, placing one row
under the sill at the front of the house and another under the sill at the back of the house, cutting
some rollers about 4 inches in diameter and placing them about two feet apart, then hooking the
big tractor to the house and very gently rolling the house the distance of the beams.  This was
repeated by moving the uncovered beams from the back end and setting them up at the front end
and rolling again.  This procedure was repeated twenty to twenty-five times to get the house to its
new location.  It was then set down and supported in its new location, and the water and
electricity were hooked up.  After this move was completed two families had two new homes.

Daddy built chicken houses holding 15,000 chickens.  He tore down an old barn structure from
Granddaddy Wright's property and built the chicken houses from this lumber.  The work he did
himself.  In the summer our well would not supply enough water to supply the needs of this many
chickens.  He constructed a system of 55 gallon barrels and tied them into the well water supply
for the three chicken houses.  Then with a tractor, wagon, and a load of empty barrels we went to
the creek for water.  The creek water was then put into the barrels in each chicken house and the
chickens had their water for the day.  This was a daily occurrence as the days got hotter and the
chickens grew larger.

Daddy was a very active member in his church, Hopewell Baptist Church, for many years.  He
joined the church in 1937 and was elected church clerk every year on a yearly basis between
1950 and 1970.  He was also church treasurer during much of that time.

In 1945 after Papa Burgess had passed away in 1944, Daddy built a small house at the edge of
our yard for Grandmother Burgess to live in.  It was in this house that she was living in 1966
when she had the stroke that took her life.  At about this same time my Mother, Estelle, took ill
with a spinal disease that would confine her to a wheel chair for the rest of her life, until she
passed away in 2002.  They made many trips to doctors in Atlanta and other places trying to get
help for her.  It was all to no benefit and she finally lost all her motor skills and Daddy was
confined at home to look after her.  He still kept busy working.  He had a repair shop at his house
in which he repaired antique clocks, antique furniture, and installed new bottoms in Lincoln
rockers, ladder-back chairs and Brumby style rockers.  At the time of Mama's illness Daddy had
to take over all the household chores including cooking, mending, cleaning, shopping, and all the
other things that men don't like to do, but I heard him say many time that he hoped God would
allow him to live longer that Mama so that he could take care of her.