Jane Anderson Autry remembers bring awoken at 4:30 a.m. growing up in Dunwoody, Georgia to the sound of a horn. The horn of the Copeland Dairy truck would honk before it left to delivery milk. Copeland Dairy and the Copeland home were just down the road from the Anderson home. Jane grew up at the corner of Mount Vernon Road and Tilly Mill Road along with her sister Carolyn, brother Ken and parents Walter and Lucy Carpenter Anderson.
John and Mary Donaldson Copeland owned the dairy in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Their home sat where Lidl and CVS are today in the triangle formed by Mount Vernon Road, Jett Ferry Road, and Dunwoody Club Drive. Dunwoody Club Drive was a dirt road known as Old Lawrenceville Road at that time.
Over on the other side of what is now Dunwoody Club Drive was the dairy operation. This is the location of the Orchard Park Shopping Center and Kroger today. There was a pasture, large barn for milking and another barn for bottling and storing milk.
There was a small rock house that sat in the corner of the shopping center parking lot, which was home to John and Mary’s son and daughter-in-law. Another house sat where Chick-Fil-A sits today and was home to a daughter and her family.
Most of the customers of Copeland Dairy lived in Atlanta. John and Mary Copeland’s son Clifford drove the delivery truck each morning to Atlanta to make milk deliveries. A few local customers came to the dairy to purchase milk, but most of the small farms in Dunwoody and other nearby communities had at least one cow.
John Copeland was one of nine children of Obediah and Salina Copeland, whose home was where Dunwoody Springs Elementary School is today, along Roberts Drive. At one time, Obediah and Salina operated a cotton gin, general store, and the Grogansville Post Office at their property. Their well was also a popular stopping place for travelers.
Another of Obediah and Salina’s children, Larkin Copeland, operated a store in the early part of the twentieth century on Chamblee Dunwoody Road, where Walgreen’s and Fresh Market are located today.
Jane Autry also has a family connection to the Copelands. John and Larkin Copeland’s sister, Mary Jane Copeland, married Calhoun Spruill and they were the great grandparents of Jane, Carolyn and Ken. The Carpenter and Anderson families didn’t get their milk from the Copeland Dairy. As mentioned earlier, most families in Dunwoody had a cow and that was true for Jane and her family.