Casulon Plantation

Thursday, June 6, 2013


Charred and crumbling and obscured by trees, the shell of Casulon Plantation looks as if it’s been falling down for the last one hundred years. When I first saw photos of it I figured that the old house had been a Civil War casualty, or maybe just a Windsor Ruins-like victim of an accidental fire, burned down in an era when a dropped cigar or overturned lamp could torch a house in no time.

The real story of Casulon is somewhat less romantic, though just as sad. It involves a “suspicious” fire, an over-eager rock mining company, a former Georgia governor, Civil War re-enactments, and a bed and breakfast. Oh, and hippies.

The house was built in 1824 in the heart of Georgia plantation country, just a few miles away from the Ponder House. James Harris, Casulon’s builder, owned over a hundred slaves and thousands of acres, and eventually added Greek columns to the house to show for it. Somehow Casulon made it through the Civil War unscathed, and in 1883 it was the setting for the wedding of Harris’ daughter Susie and the governor of Georgia. Newspapers across the state talked up the home’s grandeur and charm, the carefully decorated tables at the bridal dinner, the “grove of beautiful and stately oaks.”

Of course now it’s hard to imagine anyone calling Casulon’s grounds stately. They’re overgrown with trees and weeds, littered with trash, and overrun by wasps. The estate began to decline in the late 1940s, when the home’s elderly owner died and left it to her nephews, who could only see the impracticality of owning such a place. They left it to sit empty, then sold it off to a cork company that had plans for demolition. Fortunately the Morgan County Historical Society jumped in and saved Casulon, though even they weren’t quite sure what to do with it. In the 1970s they rented it out to hippies, who in turn gave tours to visitors. Somehow, it didn’t quite work out.

In the ’80s Casulon was properly restored and turned into a bed and breakfast. For years the grounds were open to the public again, hosting Civil War re-enactments and antebellum-themed festivals. But the land around Casulon was too valuable. In the ’90s, a local mining company tried and failed to start operations just in back of the house. Then Hanson Aggregates stepped in and fought even harder to put in a quarry. Casulon’s owners, overwhelmed and going through personal troubles of their own, had to sell the house. While they were away one night, a fire was set off in back of the estate, burning it down past repair. Arson was suspected, though no one was ever charged.

Since then the house has been left as it was on the night of the fire. When we went, the grounds were so overgrown that it was hard to even find a pathway in. The place is fenced off, with No Trespassing signs everywhere and cop cars driving slowly by on the gravel roads (not that you can really drive anything but slowly on those roads). Squatters manage to evade the police and live in what’s left of Casulon, though in its roofless state I imagine that accommodations aren’t nearly as comfortable as what the hippies had.

As far as I know, Hanson Aggregates’ Casulon quarry plans never came about.1



Posted in Abandoned, Civil War, Georgia, History | 4 Responses

Southport, North Carolina

Thursday, May 30, 2013


Even on warm, sunny days, Southport is quieter than other coastal towns we’ve been to in the southeast. There are tourists at the seafood restaurants and in the shops downtown, but it isn’t hard to escape them. All you have to do is take a side-street, find yourself a cool sidewalk lined with live oaks, and scout out an empty park bench somewhere along the waterfront. Watch the sailboats go by and the fishermen bringing in their catch from the pier.

Most tourists around these parts ignore Southport, drawn instead to the larger Wilmington and the flashier Myrtle Beach. As a result Southport feels more like an old-fashioned fishing village than a tourist destination. It’s quiet and slow-paced, just the way southern coastal towns are in movies, which makes complete sense when you learn that Southport has served as the setting for many a teen romance film and Nicholas Sparks adaptation. But don’t let that stop you from visiting.

Southport’s history goes way back before the movies, and there’s a lot more adventure in it than romance. Established in the 1700s, the village then known as Smithville sprang up around Fort Johnston, which had been built to protect the Cape Fear River region against pirate attacks. The fort played a role in the Revolutionary War as well as the Civil War, instrumental in many successful Confederate blockade runs. Fort Johnston still sits along the waterfront today, although it has changed somewhat throughout the years. Less changed is Southport’s old cemetery, just a few blocks away. The Old Smithville Burying Ground still holds onto the town’s original name, and is shaded and overgrown, with sandy paths and random fields given over to wildflowers. Well, that part is a little romantic.

Across the street, the Old Brunswick County Jail stands guard, though it hasn’t housed any inmates since the 1970s. Nowadays the jail is maintained by members of the Southport Historical Society, who keep the building looking properly imposing for the tourists who stop to visit or for the next film crew to come to town.






Posted in Cemeteries, History, North Carolina | 1 Response

Pasaquan

Thursday, May 2, 2013


Like Howard Finster, Eddie Martin was a man of visions. His just came from a different kind of place.

In the 1950s, while Finster was still hard at work on his first outdoor garden museum—the first incarnation of his Bible verse-soaked folk art kingdom Paradise Garden—Martin was living the wild life in New York. He’d escaped his rural Georgia home at the age of 14, hitchiking his way to Washington D.C. and to New York City, where he made a living doing everything from fortune-telling to gambling to street hustling. Then he got sick, and then the visions started to come. Three people from the future came to him in a dream, urging him to move back home to Georgia to create an artistic utopia. So Eddie Owens Martin canonized himself St. EOM and moved back to the old family homestead in Buena Vista, Georgia. Aided by his spiritual messengers and by marijuana, armed with hundreds of cans of Sherwin-Williams paint, St. EOM transformed his late mother’s simple farmhouse into the psychedelic temple of Pasaquan.

It took us around two hours to get to Buena Vista from Atlanta. We drove through suburbs and country towns, by rolling fields already green in early April. The scenery changed once we got closer. The green fields turned brown, and most of the forests we drove by were black and halfway burned, but the dull landscape just made Pasaquan stand out all the more. The Sherwin-Williams paint may have faded over the years, but St. EOM’s compound is still probably the brightest thing in all of Buena Vista.

Eddie Martin continued to add to Pasaquan until 1986, when he killed himself at the age of 77.  Today Pasaquan is operated by the Pasaquan Preservation Society, and is open one day a month to visitors.  When we went there the farmhouse was crowded with people, mostly young, walking through the exhibits inside and asking questions. We even overheard one couple planning a Pasaquan wedding, which sounded kind of amazing—maybe even as good a wedding at Rock City. I’ve read before that some visitors to Pasaquan pick up on weird vibes and can’t take it, but I thought it was a cheerful place, that the only menacing things there were the bees that made their home in the meditation building.

Well, Pasaquan has bees, but then so does Paradise Garden. Walking around St. EOM’s compound, it’s hard not to make comparisons between the two places, and I wondered if Eddie Martin and Howard Finster had ever met. Their brightly painted homesteads had a lot in common as far as looks go, but their subject matter couldn’t have been much different. I imagined that Pasaquan’s pagan totems and pretty obvious depictions of genitalia would have shocked Finster, and I thought that Paradise Garden’s tributes to Jesus and Coca Cola would have made St. EOM roll his eyes, and I could picture a real Georgia folk art rivalry. The late writer and poet Jonathan Williams knew both men, and in an essay on Howard Finster he describes a much more light-hearted relationship:

Before getting [to Paradise Garden], I discussed it all with that bodacious bad-ass, Eddie Owens Martin, St. EOM of the “Land of Pasaquan”— “the Big Injun,” as Howard called him. The Big Injun claimed he said things like: “I mean, I just love to tempt men of the cloth.” He’d get on the phone and say: “Reverend Finster, yessir, good buddy-roe, I’d sure like to get into your pants!” (This is one of those telephone conversations you doubt ever got made.) No matter. The Rev. Finster, a righteous Baptist of northwest Georgia persuasion, talked about “queery boys,” as one might expect. No matter. I never heard him speak unkindly of his great contemporary, Eddie Owens Martin, who was gayer than a square grape.

I wonder if those phone calls ever took place, or if the two men spent much time together in person. I’d like to think that they did. I’d like to imagine the “Big Injun” and the good reverend making jokes and poking fun at each other, maybe talking art and their favorite shades of Sherwin-Williams.










Posted in Georgia, Roadside | 2 Responses

Ponder House

Monday, March 18, 2013


The twin monuments in Ponder Cemetery are almost startling to come across when you’re driving along Fairplay Rd. in Morgan County, Georgia. From a distance they look like they don’t belong: tall gothic spires jutting out of rolling fields and farmland. It’s hard to make sense of them until you see the much smaller gravestones scattered around them and the white plantation house in the distance.

This part of Morgan County is cotton country. At the turn of the 20th century, multiple hamlets (too small to be called towns) sprung up around the county as the industry boomed. Successful landowners and farm families built up crossroad communities around cotton gins and country stores. The cotton gin at tiny Fairplay is long gone, though supposedly the town store is still there. I didn’t really notice it. All I could focus on was that cemetery and the still immaculate Ponder house.

It started out as the centerpiece of an antebellum plantation, worked by slaves.  John H. Ponder had the house built sometime around 1850.  According to 1860 census records1 his son George owned 54 slaves, more than most landowners in the area. But the Civil War hit the Ponders hard. In August of 1864, Union soldiers stopped at the plantation to rest and to pillage, leaving the house alone, but stealing horses and clearing out all of the food in storage. John H. Ponder had had enough. He died on November 17th, 1864, just as Sherman’s army was beginning to invade Morgan County on its march to the sea. Family lore has it that the elder Ponder was so worked up with anger at the thought of being raided by the Yankees again that he had a heart attack and died on the spot.2

I can’t find a whole lot of information about what came next for the Ponders. I know that George continued to run the plantation, focusing mainly on cotton after the war was lost and slavery was outlawed. Many of the former slaves stayed on as tenant farmers, forming their own culturally rich communities around the area. George Ponder and his wife Sara had sixteen children, all of whom are buried out in the family cemetery.  None of them lived past the age of ten.3


Posted in African American History, Cemeteries, Civil War, Georgia, History, Roadside | 6 Responses