Ten Years on a Yankee Plantation, Episode1

Introduction to the Series

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.”  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. It was the corridor through which westward expansion was pioneered, a monoculture of rich timber and naval stores. It was the corridor used by Spanish explorers to explore the regions north of their colony in La Florida.  Amazingly grazing lands beneath the trees carried the cattle ranging traditions of our Celtic forebearers to the heart of Texas. The plain supplied much of the raw material used in building our nation. It is suggestive that 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. This is not intended as history-merely an account of some of the trials and joys I experienced during my decade spent in this romantic place I came to love. (The episodes described in this series are not intended as history or autobiography, only a description of some of the most memorable moments of my life at Pebble Hill.)

From the Met to the Waffle House

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 far beyond 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, doves 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 Christmas Yule Tide often brought a day or two in the 70’s.

Thomasville, Georgia -like many small southern cities -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 of more hotels.

This small town, only a few miles north of the capitol of Florida, Tallahassee (itself hardly more than a small town)  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. Some of the wealthy 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. Many were Clevelanders, 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 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 compared to the other plantations (it includes of only about 2,000 acres), it is surrounded by other much larger Hanna family estates. Its last owner, Pansy Ireland Poe (later Mrs. Parker Barrington Poe), directed in her will that the place be turned into a museum. It’s architecture, elaborate outbuildings 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 the place set up for public visitation.

That spring and summer was an exhausting time. I moved my family of four 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. 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 the guests with children were expected to be noisy.

Our governing board included Hanna family members for the most part and initially Mr. Parker Poe, widower of Pebble Hill’s last personal 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. Parker was a handsome, young-ish army officer when the two had married. Pansy had made it her patriotic duty to entertain young military officers from Fort Benning during World War II.

Another family member of the board was Mrs. Gilbert Louise Humphrey, widow who still reflected in occasional comments the sadness associated when a loved one is lost. She owned the largest of the Red Hills 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.    

Suffice it to say, that these were people of considerable wealth and influence. But I knew them mainly as enthusiastic supporters of the 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 owned a pack of beagles used in rabbit hunting and often had a yellow Labrador retriever at her side when she came to Pebble Hill. She was kind and generous to me and to my family. I never saw her when she was not immaculate in her appearance. Her thoughtfulness helped my work go well. And, she would persuade the board to help me move our family into a bit more secluded residence so that we were not constantly having tourists knocking on our door-or worse, barging in on a Saturday morning to find us in our bedclothes.

Louise also maintained an office for a time at One Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. She was the President of the Metropolitan Association. I knew little of 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 1980’s was still in many ways a smalltown city grown large. 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 life mostly in libraries and college classrooms. The opera was by Rossini (L’itlia in Algeri), I discovered to my surprise that Italian opera was joyful, humorous, and romantic. There were no dreary heroics, few swords and no funerals. Strictly comedic romance.

I had brought along another couple, my very good friends Garland and Lavona Mears from Americus. 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 curstomers 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 for a long moment in silent admiration before glancing back at our plastic-covered menues.