the company purchased two new locomotives from Hinkley Locomotive Works that were named "Brunswick" and "Macon." This brought their total number of engines at the time to eight. The names of two of the others were "Georgia" and "Corsair." By September 1869, the line had been completed from Macon to Lumber City, Georgia and the trestle over the Ocmulgee River near Lumber City was nearing completion. The last spike was driven on December 14, 1869 near what has since become Hazlehurst, Georgia. Freight delivery was scheduled to begin the next day. Passenger service began along the line by the middle of January 1870. Financial decline Not long after it was completed, the company fell upon hard times. By 1873, the company was failing to pay interest on company bonds endorsed by the state of Georgia, and a committee of state senators and state representatives were appointed to examine the financial condition of the company. On July 2, 1873, governor James Milton Smith, announced that the state of Georgia had seized the Macon and Brunswick Railroad for failure to pay interest on its bonds. From 1873 to 1881 the state of Georgia owned the company. In 1875, the state of Georgia attempted to sell the railroad, but could not find a buyer. In September 1879, the Georgia General Assembly passed an act authorizing the lease or sale of the railroad. The act also authorized the extension of the line from Brunswick to the Florida line and from Macon to Atlanta. Two years later in 1881, the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railway bought the railroad. In 1894, the ETV&G became part of the Southern Railway. Today it is part of the Norfolk Southern Railway's Brunswick District. Economic and political effects The construction of the railroad had a great effect upon the political geography of the area of Georgia through which it passed. The coming of railroad helped establish a number of new counties and moved several county seats. It opened up settlement into an interior region of Georgia that had previously been sparsely settled outside of the area immediately along the Ocmulgee River and Altamaha River. In the History of Dodge County (1932), Mrs. Wilton Philip Cobb wrote about the founding of Eastman, Georgia:In 1869 the Macon and Brunswick railroad (now the Southern) was built. Towns began to spring up all along the line, and, as this immediate section was so