GA 310 extends approximately 24 miles from Colquitt south to GA 253 west of Bainbridge. The highway passes through Miller and western Decatur Counties and serves the town of Brinson and ends near Lake Seminole on the south end. In Miller County, GA 310 is also known as Brinson Road and Grow Street. In Decatur County, the highway is also known as Yates Spring Road south of Brinson and Brinson-Colquitt Road north of Brinson.

This highway is one of the most peculiar ones in Georgia. The shrinking and stretching, however, lended it some legitimacy by actually making the highway end at intersections with other routes. For many years, GA 310 was actually a collection of one double-spur highway and another single spur, made so because the southern portion of the highway was inaccessable to the northern portion by the lack of a bridge or ferry over part of Lake Seminole. Ironically, if this manmade watery obstacle was bridged, GA 310 could form a long by-pass west of Bainbridge.

GA 310 was originally commissioned in 1959, and the route was fully paved upon commissioning with the exception of a short unpaved section in Miller County ending at U.S. 27/GA 1 in Boykin. It is not known exactly what roads were followed, and the theory is that part or all of the original route may have been abandoned. It is still possible to go to Boykin from GA 310 today over Mothers Home Church Road (C.R. 169) and Draper Jones Road (C.R. 165). These roads remain fully unpaved, and may have been the route, but the old maps do not show a route that truly indicates that course, suggesting several possibilities, but most likely Draper Jones Road via an abandoned road south of Whites Bridge Road (C.R. 190).

Compare the two maps from 1959, the year the highway was commissioned, and 1964. Note the crooked alignment to Boykin, which was replaced a couple years later by Brinson Road, but not GA 310. Also note that the road in the second map is decommissioned while it is indicated as part of GA 310 in the first map.

Considering that, only a year after the highway was commissioned, the Miller County section of the highway was decommissioned, leaving the Brinson section of GA 310 as a double spur in Decatur County, ending at the Miller County line to the north and Lake Seminole to the south with the other section of the highway across the lake. In 1965, a new route was constructed in Miller County, extending from the GA 310 stub end north to Colquitt. However, oddly enough, this road did not become part of GA 310 for more than two decades to come. In fact, the extension to Colquitt was not completed until the early 1990's. Perhaps the consideration of decommissioning the highway was so strong that no action was taken for all that time.

When the Miller County section was commissioned, GA 310 was at maximum length, extending nearly 33 miles. This all changed, however, in 1995. That year, the 5.8 mile dead end Yates Spring Road section south of GA 253 to Lake Seminole was decommissioned and the 3.5 mile portion of the highway on the other side of the lake was changed to GA 97 Spur. Coinciding with that was the relocation of the northern end of the highway to Grow Street instead of connecting to U.S. 27 in downtown around the other major highways. However, the 2005 map shows GA 310 restored back to the former terminus! Such a shift seems highly unlikely, however.

Click on any of the maps to view a larger image. These three maps show the phases GA 310 went through from the 1980's to present. The first map is from 1988, the second from 1993 and the third from 2003. Note the extension of the route in the second map and the truncation in the third with GA 97 Spur and the relocated north end.

Maybe GDOT will have its mind made up what to do with this inchworm of a highway. Most likely, it will be full decommissioning at some point in the future, since aside from tiny Brinson, it still basically goes nowhere. GA 310 was not the only highway to have a "missing link". GA 107, 149 and 177 all existed in two sections as well as several other highways in earlier time periods. The fact that Georgia has so few of these segmented highways is actually unusual. In the meantime, a highway once divided by "No Bridge Or Ferry" makes for a peculiar enough story.