African American children in the northern part of the county for three decades, starting in 1924. Atypical for rural Georgia, it had four classrooms and two stories, accommodating boys and girls in eleven grades; it closed in 1954 when Berrien County's African American schools were consolidated in Nashville. A tornado on May 11, 1952, led to national headlines. The business area of the town was decimated and the water tower was smashed. The Red Cross set up field operations, bringing in a director from Moody Air Force Base and a mobile kitchen from Fort Benning. In 1963, the U.S. Department of Labor won a lawsuit, Wirtz v. Alapaha Yellow Pine Products, Inc., against a locally owned sawmill. At issue were Fair Labor Standards Act violations concerning overtime pay. The case became a minor landmark in labor litigation history; the case is frequently cited as a precedent for denying defendants in similar suits to have their cases heard by a jury. On October 3, 1966, Army Master Sgt. James Emory Jones of Alapaha, one of the first members of the elite Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations Group (MAC-SOG), a black-operations unit of the Vietnam War, was killed in a secret attempt to wire-tap North Vietnamese communications lines in Laos. The existence of this secret unit was concealed for many years, as well as its operations outside borders of Vietnam. Jones's entire three-man commando unit was lost; evidence suggests that the unit requested U.S. bombers fire upon its coordinates when they knew they could not escape ambush. Jones's fate and place of death were kept secret for many years, and he was listed as "missing in action" for over two decades. The 1996 novel The Wonder Book of the Air () by Cynthia Shearer is set in Alapaha and includes much of the town's history. Just outside the town is the site where the famous "Hogzilla," a "wild" hog weighing in at about , was shot on June 17, 2004, on a commercial hunting farm. The carcass of the hog was exhumed for a National Geographic special. Name The name "Alapaha" was included, along with hundreds of Native American words, in mid-19th-century pronunciation guides as both a river and a village. Even then, opinions differed as to the proper pronunciation of the word, whether it was "A-LAP-Uh-ha," or "A-LAP-uh-haw." These guides offer no speculation as to the word's meaning. There