Culture Shock – From a Yankee Plantation to a Night at the Opera

Located in the heart of “Quail Country,” Pebble Hill Plantation is a 2,000- acre hunting preserve, one of more than seventy such plantations in the region known as the “Red Hills” of southwest Georgia. These rolling hills begin just above Thomasville, Georgia. They end south of Tallahassee, capital city of Florida. They are covered with stands of longleaf pine, remnants of the great woodlands that once dominated the landscape of the Great American Coastal Plain that stretches along the Atlantic from southern New Jersey to East Texas and includes the southern half of Georgia.

This was the corridor through which westward expansion was pioneered, a rich source of timber and naval stores. It was the corridor used by the Spanish to explore the regions north and west of their colony in La Florida.  Amazingly, wiregrass grazing lands beneath the trees would ultimately carry the cattle ranging traditions of our pioneering Celtic forebearers to the heart of Texas.

The southern coastal plain supplied much of the raw material used in building our nation. Longleaf pine was used in the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and cut into boards to floor the houses of Victorian America.  As a historian who was born in Burke County Georgia, the “Bird Dog Capital of the World,” I was primed to accept the appointment as the foundation’s first Executive Director in 1983.

I spent a decade of my career managing one of the most famous millionaire family retreats in the South. Pebble Hill Plantation is one of the 70 or so privately held quail hunting plantations in southwest Georgia. This may sound like an unlikely place for a retreat to many Georgians, especially among those who have never ventured south of the Atlanta perimeter. But, during the last third of the nineteenth century, before Florida boomed and golf became the rage, Thomas County attracted many affluent winter tourists. It also offered beautiful longleaf forests and grassy borders where there was an abundance of quail, duck, dove, turkey and other wildlife.

The closing decades of the nineteenth century were the “golden age” of the “sporting life,” of angling, skiing, sailing, duck hunting and shooting over bird dogs. Urban life, with all its suggestions of civilization and its realities of squalid industrialization, seemed to require an escape back to nature. Fishing and hunting magazines and resorts proliferated. Cool Maine was the place for well-off tourists to spend the summer, but South Georgia was an equally attractive refuge during its mild winters, where the Christmas season often brought a day or week of temperatures in the 70’s.

Thomasville -like many smaller Georgia cities -such as Augusta and Americus -attracted its share of winter visitors, who enjoyed what was thought at the time to be the healthy vapors given off by pine trees. They could walk, horseback ride or bicycle on a boulevard that encircled the city or enjoy the shady park adjoining the downtown (locally known as “Yankee Paradise Park”). The city boasted at one time a half dozen or more hotels.

This small town, only a few miles north of the capital of Florida (Tallahassee, itself no more than a small town itself in the late 19th century) was then the southern end of rail connections to the south. Florida was unappealing because -except for a few small towns like Miami and Tampa-there were few accommodations and the state’s reputation for Yellow Fever and Malaria would persist into the early twentieth century. The real estate bonanza and hotel building craze would not hit south Florida until the 1920s’. Some of the wealthier tourists who came to Thomasville began to buy up the plantations that had prospered there before the Civil War. Land was cheap and plantation- style homes dotted the county. Physically untouched by the Civil War, the infrastructure of the Old South was still in evidence. 

Among those who bought winter shooting estates were members of the Hanna family from Cleveland, Ohio. The new owners were often wealthy “tycoons” associated with John D, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company.  Their quail hunting estates exist to this day and Thomas County is still regarded by many sportsmen (and wildlife artists) as a natural paradise.

Pebble Hill Plantation was -and is-the best known of these great hunting preserves in part because its main house is enormous. Even some family members jokingly refer to it as the “Pebble Hilton.” Small in land, it is surrounded by other much larger Hanna family estates. Its last owner, Miss Pansy Ireland (later Mrs. Parker Barrington Poe), directed in her will that the place be turned into a museum. Its architecture, elaborate outbuildings (more than thirty of them) and remarkable collection of paintings and sculpture promised to make it a popular attraction.  In the spring of 1983, I was invited to become the first director with the task of  preparing the place for thousands of visitors and -as events would prove-many dignitaries.

That spring and summer was an exhausting time. I moved my family to live in the “Overflow Cottage” (known as the “O.C”) which was only a few steps away from the main house. It was roomy, if not beautiful, with an enormous front porch that overlooked the raised beds of the kitchen and cutting gardens. It was furnished in what we jokingly called “Early Calvin Coolidge” style. The OC had originally been built as a home for a French gardener and his family, I was told. More recently, it was used as a guest house when the main house’s 20-odd bedroom suites were occupied, or by guests with children who were expected to be distractingly noisy.

Our governing board included Hanna family members for the most part. Initially, Mr. Parker Poe, widower of Pebble Hill’s last owner, Mrs. Pansy Ireland Poe, chaired the foundation’s board. Pansy was legendary for her horsemanship as a young woman. She had won the Madison Square Garden Horse Show and owned a horse farm, “Shawnee ,” in the Kentucky Blue Grass.  Pansy had made it her patriotic duty to entertain young military officers from nearby Fort Benning during World War II. Parker Poe was a handsome, young army officer among those who visited. The two were married after the war.

Another family member of the board was Mrs. Gilbert Louise Humphrey. Gilbert was the son of George Humphrey, Secretary of the Treasury under President Dwight Eisenhower. Some readers will recall that Eisenhower was an occasional visitor to Augusta to play golf, and also came to stay with the Humphries and play golf at Thomasville’s Glen Arven Country Club. Louise owned the largest of the Thomasville-area plantations, the fifty – thousand-acre “Woodfield Springs,” which sat astride the Georgia-Florida line. Of the board members, it would be Louise I would get to know best. In her sixties, Louise was Pansy Poe’s niece, and like her aunt, she was a sportswoman who loved the animals and pastimes that were part of plantation life.  She seemed always to be immactuately dressed for every occasion and was often accompanied by one of her Labrador retrievers. She hunted rabbits with her pack of beagles (astride a mule she told me).

Suffice it to say, that these were people of considerable wealth and influence. But I knew them mainly as enthusiastic supporters of Pansy Poe’s goal of making Pebble Hill Plantation a wonderful place to visit, where the sporting tradition and its arts would be kept alive. I think I saw them at their most relaxed, enjoying their holidays, reunited with family and friends and with their beloved horses and dogs.

Louise was kind and generous to me and my family.   Her thoughtfulness helped my work go well. And she persuaded the board to move our family out of the OC into a bit more secluded residence so that tourists would not be knocking on our door-or worse, barging in -on a Sunday morning to find us in our bedclothes. Our new home was in a house built adjacent to a fifty -acre pasture. It had been built to serve as a residence for the dairy’s herd master (an immigrant from the Isle of Jersey) -a Jersey herd that would become nationally famous. We enjoyed the peaceful isolation.

Louise also maintained an office for a time at Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. She was the President of the Metropolitan Opera Association. I knew little about the opera at the time and was a bit dumbstruck when Louise presented me with four tickets to the Met’s performance on its (then annual) visit to Atlanta.

Atlanta in the early 1980’s was still in many ways a smalltown city not yet metropolitan. It rolled up its streets and turned out the lights on weeknights, even the night we went to the opera. Much to my surprise, Louise Humphry was host for the affair and came on stage to welcome attendees, thanking Atlanta patrons for their efforts that made the Met’s visit possible.  It was all I could do not to stand up and announce that I worked for this elegant and important champion of the arts. The performance that followed was mesmerizing for a young man who had spent his youth growing up in the “sticks” and his adult life mostly in libraries and college classrooms.

The opera was by Rossini (L’italia in Algeri). I discovered to my surprise that Italian opera was joyful, humorous, and romantic. There were no dreary heroics, very little sword play and no funerals or suicides. This one was strictly a comedic romance.

We  brought along another couple, my very good friends Garland and Lavona. I had met them a decade earlier when I first arrived in Americus – where I had been on the faculty of Georgia Southwestern Sate University . Afterward, we were anxious to have some food and talk about our evening before we began the long drive back to Americus and Thomasville. But we could not find a restaurant or even a drive-in open. We drove around for half an hour, passing a shooting scene where half a dozen Atlanta Police squad cars, their red and blue lights blazing, surrounded a body lying in the street.  Finally, we stumbled on a Waffle House. What the heck! We had no trouble finding a parking place at that hour. And, I had learned during my poverty- stricken years as a college student that this would be the place to get a hearty meal “on the cheap.”

The aroma of fried food warmed us back to good humor after the upsetting street encounter.  The waitress was dressed in a uniform that was neatly starched and ironed, complete with one of those undersized pin-on caps waitresses were then so often required to wear.  She had been listening in on our conversation about the opera, peppered with laughter about how little we understood of our evening’s experience.

Instead of taking our order immediately, she asked what opera we had seen and listened as we described -as best we could-what it was about. We were astonished when she named the opera, succinctly summarized the plot (the kidnapping of an English lady by a khedive of the Barbary Pirates), explained to her slack-jawed customers that Rossini was much better known as the composer of The Barber of Seville -which we all responded to with a ‘knowing” nod. Then, singing a few bars in Italian from the opera, she inquired if we were ready to order. We sat -mouths open- for a long moment in silent admiration before glancing back at our plastic-covered menus.