worked to save the buildings, which had begun to burn after midnight. Lost were a store belonging to H.B. Young, a sewing machine repair business belonging to Mr. Norton, who managed to save his tools and materials, a two-story building owned by J.H. Baker, an old livery stable run by J.S. Turner, and a storehouse managed by W.S. Walker that contained of wine, an iron safe, and books and papers. Two of the buildings were owned by a T. Cook. The paper reported that "the cause of the fire is not known, but the general opinion is that someone must have set it on fire." 20th century and later The 1907 roster of the Georgia Medical Association lists two physicians from Alapaha, W.A. Moore and G.A. Paulk. Alapaha was the site of a famous Atlantic Coast Line Railroad train wreck on March 26, 1911, when the Dixie Flyer derailed on a high trestle across the Alapaha River, killing ten and injuring many, including wealthy Northern socialites who were traveling to the coast. On December 30, 1914, a patent application for a "portable shower-bath" with a detailed diagram was submitted by inventor Robert Alex Rutland of Alapaha, and witnessed by E.F. Tiller and W.M. Gaskins, local entrepreneurs. The patent was granted by the U.S. Patent Office on July 20, 1915. On July 4, 1918, the Alapaha, a wooden paddle-wheeler Ferris-type cargo ship whose dead-weight tonnage was 3,500, registered in Cornwells Heights, Pennsylvania, was christened and launched. The ship routinely transported cargo such as coal between Philadelphia and the French cities of Rouen and Le Havre. The vessel was featured in a New York Tribune headline "Freighter in Distress," reported to be off the Atlantic Coast, "heavy seas breaking over her deck, her steam pipes were broken; her seams had opened up and several feet of water were in her hold." The freighter survived, only to meet with delays during the marine workers' union strikes of 1919. Alapaha lost four men (of 25 total from Berrien County) in the infamous Otranto troopship disaster off the coast of Scotland, eight weeks before the Armistice ended World War I. Their names and hometowns were published among 200 dead in the New York Times coverage. They were James Malcolm McMillan, Arthur Harper, William Hayes, and B.F. McCranie. The Alapaha Colored School, one of the historic place listings in Berrien County, was the only school for