Mills B. Lane, Jr. and Enterprise in a New South

Abstract

For a century, Citizens Southern Bank was a fixture in Georgia. In 1991, the CS brand name disappeared in a merger with North Carolina National Bank. This was one of the bittersweet consequences of the slow, confusing swirl of bank deregulation after 1970, when institutions such as CS simply disappeared, swallowed by the “winners” in the new competitive environment of interstate banking in the 1980s and 1990s. Even earlier, however, the Lane family had ceased to control the bank started by Mills Lane, Sr. in 1891. Mills B. Lane, Jr. was the last member of the Lane family to run CS. After his retirement in 1973, Mills handpicked his successor and tried to retain some influence, but the bank began slipping away from the Lanes. By the early 80s, a decade before Hugh McColl’s NCNB acquired CS, Mills Lane, Jr. was deeply alienated from the institution that had been, according to many, “Georgia’s cornerstone bank.”