For decades, the 2,000 or so who live in the two former copper-mining towns, tucked away amid the greenery of three national forests, have whispered about the illegal adoptions - the so-called Hicks Babies.
Mostly, the dark secret of the towns stayed unreported until last month, when an Ohio woman, frustrated by a futile, seven-year search for her biological parents, took her story to the press.
Since then, a local Probate Court judge who has helped start a national registry of Hicks Babies has determined that at least 200 babies were sold to couples in six states.
The ensuing spotlight on the area has divided residents into those who'll discuss an old and unpleasant secret, and those unwilling to exhume the past.
``It's started a controversy, that's for sure,'' said Greg Crawford, a vice president of the bank and a student of local history.
``Everyone who was around at the time knew it was happening and didn't really say anything about it. Now, a lot of people just want it to be over. A lot of people are saying they should just leave well enough alone.''
That seemed unlikely last Wednesday as some townspeople gossiped about brushing shoulders with one television crew while others prepared to host another.
The Hicks story is just too compelling to leave alone.
It's a saga of illegal abortions and black-market adoptions, of the powerful human drive to know one's lineage, and of the communal sanctity of a town's long-held secrets.
It is a story now told through conflicting memories of Hicks, who died in 1972, and underscored by the search for any medical records, once thought to be stored in the mausoleum his family owned.
It is also the story of adopted children - now adults - who are finding shared roots with scores of others, roots that began here.
* The story began to come to light hundreds of miles from here, in the Canton, Ohio, suburb of Jackson Township, in the heart and mind of a woman named Jane Blasio.
Blasio, a 32-year-old college student majoring in criminal justice, had known since she was 5 that she was adopted, and had wondered for years what the circumstances were because she had discovered some discrepancies in what her adoptive parents told her.
Seven years ago, Blasio started looking for her birth parents, a search that has brought her here several times in search of elusive birth records.
Blasio said Thursday that she has stopped doing interviews because some media outlets ``have not been covering this responsibly,'' but she has talked about what drove her.
``You look in the mirror and you don't really know who you are,'' Blasio said in one interview last month. ``My parents are gone. The older you get, you get into a frenzy. The information is dying. I want my medical history and I want my heritage. I want what I believe I have the right to.''
So four years ago, Blasio's search led her to the Fannin County Courthouse in nearby Blue Ridge.
That proved to be a dead-end: She found that her birth certificate listed her adoptive mother as the birth mother. As she continued her search, she found that many other adoption records contained the same notation.
To make matters worse, there was no one left who had been involved in the adoptions in an official capacity. Hicks, his nurse, the county clerk who signed the falsified birth certificates - even the county sheriff who arrested Hicks for performing illegal abortions in 1964 - were all dead.
So Blasio enlisted Probate Judge Linda Davis, who said she had wondered about the number of out-of-state parents but had nothing to go on until she met Blasio. Then she began combing through county birth records and found scores of babies born at the Hicks Community Clinic - like Blasio, supposedly born to out-of-state parents, mothers from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, Arkansas and Illinois.
The circumstances remained shrouded in mystery until Blasio went public with her story. An avalanche of calls revealed women who said that they had paid Hicks for babies and been listed as birth mothers.
Finding the biological mothers proved much harder. The babies and the mothers were white. Essentially, all there was to hasten the search was people's memories, and many here were unwilling to share those.
Still, after Blasio and Davis established a ``Hicks Baby Registry,'' calls poured in - from Hicks Babies, from a handful of mothers, from people with information.
At first, Davis thought that Hicks had sold about 100 babies between 1955 and 1964. By last week, the number was 200 and growing, Davis said.
``It was pretty hectic for a while,'' Davis said. ``We're encouraging people to register with the registry. Even if they're not a child or a mother, if they have information that's pertinent, that's what we're asking them to do.''
Davis said that whenever a mother and child are matched through the registry, they are each asked if they want to be known to the other, and if so, are encouraged to undergo DNA testing.
Davis said that her checks were ongoing, but she did not want to identify those who had been matched or discuss the process. ``We're being very, very careful,'' she said. ``A lot of these people have already gone through a lot of hurt. We don't want to make a mistake.''
* McCaysville, Ga. - 100 miles north of Atlanta and 70 miles east of Chattanooga, Tenn. - has a single stoplight surrounded by small stores and modest homes along the Ocoee River, surrounded by Chattahoochee, Cherokee and Nantahala National Forests.
When Dr. Thomas Jugarthy Hicks set up his clinic on Toccoa Street in the 1940s, he was only coming from Copper Hill, just across the border in Tennessee. Why he switched towns is not certain, but Hicks had just completed a federal sentence for selling drugs, a conviction that cost him his license to practice medicine in Tennessee.
Here in Georgia, he was just two blocks from his Tennessee home, but he was out from under Tennessee's medical authorities.
He soon built the clinic into a thriving abortion facility.
In those far different times - when getting an illegal abortion often involved back alleys and was sometimes a fatal step for the mother - Hicks built a reputation as a safe, reliable doctor. ``Fix you right up,'' he would reassure patients as he ushered them into his pale-yellow brick clinic with its black-and-white-canvas awning, residents said.
They said most of his patients came from out of town. Wealthy parents brought their daughters to see him, sometimes waiting outside in limousines during the procedure. Some patients, however, were local.
Crawford, the bank vice president, remembers seeing them as a boy. ``My grandmother would see one of the girls and say, `Don't look at her,' '' he said.
Crawford said he recalls Hicks tooling around town in his mud-spattered navy or black Cadillac, sometimes hauling hay to the farm he owned outside town.
Starting in the mid-1950s, Hicks reportedly started offering to deliver babies and put them up for adoption, allowing some of the women a stay on his farm until they delivered.
Doris Abernathy, 69, who lives near the clinic and said she knew some of the women who gave up babies for adoption, wondered about that offer by Hicks, whom she described as ``complex.''
``I wonder if he had a change of mind,'' she said. ``I think he decided to start trying to save some of the babies.''
Other residents, however, remember Hicks as a man who got away with everything he could. In recent weeks, one woman has told a Chattanooga newspaper that Hicks took her baby and sold it because she could not pay her medical bill.
Abernathy said she remembered the doctor as a ``handsome, charming'' man who was a civic asset. ``He was a good neighbor,'' she said. ``He was really good to his church. He was a charter member of the Kiwanis Club.
``The part of Dr. Hicks I knew was good, but evidently, there was another side.''
Abernathy said several of the Hicks Babies have sought her out in recent weeks. Several of them, she said, just wanted to meet their birth mothers and thank them for not getting abortions.
Still, she said, she could understand why some here might want to leave the past alone. ``I think there is concern that some people might get hurt,'' she said.
* For months, the town of McCaysville tried to locate any birth records that Hicks might have kept.
Recently, some here thought that might be about to change. Because Hicks, his wife and their children all left behind instructions to be buried outside the family's mausoleum, there had been whispered speculation for years that he had stashed the records inside the crypt.
Last month, a judge issued a search warrant and authorities opened the mausoleum to much fanfare as television cameras rolled.
There were no records inside.
FOR MORE INFORMATION * Birth mothers or Hicks Babies can provide information by writing: Hicks Clinic Babies, P.O. Box 134, Green, Ohio 44232, or Hicks Clinic Babies, P.O. Box 245, Blue Ridge, Ga. 30513.
