Neighbors don’t have to be strangers.

That’s the advice of Randall Oliver, who organized a community watch in the area around his Mount Pleasant Road home in Cohutta two years ago and has seen a myriad of benefits come to him and his neighbors.

On Saturday, Oliver met with dozens of his friends and neighbors at New Covenant Baptist Church for the second annual Neighborhood Watch cookout.

“I didn’t know how successful it would be. I was just hoping to make people aware of their neighbors,” Oliver, now captain of the Watch, said. “I knew nobody when I moved here six years ago when I moved into Fred Ledford’s father’s house. I didn’t know him at all at first, but now I don’t think there’s anything I couldn’t call on Fred for.”

The lazy stretch of country road in the extreme Northeast corner of Whitfield County, with its big yards and oftentimes big homes, seems an unlikely candidate for a Neighborhood Watch program. But Oliver said that was not the case just a couple of years ago.

“Three years ago, I had a trailer stolen out of my yard, and a neighbor had tools stolen from his barn,” Oliver said. “Then somebody was going too fast down the road and almost hit my wife as she was going to the mailbox. They slammed on the brakes and locked up. I was furious.”

No longer. Today, thanks to petitions from the Neighborhood Watch, the road has been paved and the speed limit reduced to 40 mph. It’s no longer cars that come to a screeching halt — crime has.

“Several speeding tickets have been written,” said Oliver, a truck driver for Woodstock Gas in Tennga. “We now have people riding bikes along our road and mothers walking babies in strollers.”

Saturday, kids and adults alike were treated to food, music, hay rides, horseshoes and other games under two tents and the shade of 100-year-old oak trees.

The Boys of Alabama — Rick Durham, Skip Smith and Raymon Phillips — played country gospel on a truck-trailer stage. Youngsters had items such as a heart and a University of Tennessee “Power T” painted on their faces, and door prizes were given away.

Kids such as Daniel McBryear, 6, and Christopher Parker, 12, jumped in the back of a Whitfield County Sheriff’s patrol car and a Whitfield County Fire Department fire truck, where they blew the horn for all to hear — the clarion call of a neighborhood in good hands.

For more information on Whitfield County Neighborhood Watch programs, contact Lt. Wayne Mathis of the Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office at (706) 278-1233.