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 Comments

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 | 4 Comments

The Battle of Thompson’s Station

Wednesday, March 13, 2013


Abraham Lincoln, American historical figure of the moment, made an appearance at the event commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Thompson’s Station, but he wasn’t the star of the show. To be fair, he didn’t really belong there. The real Abe Lincoln wasn’t in the habit of attending small Tennessee battles, but then neither was Robert E. Lee, who also was to be found walking the grounds of Homestead Manor.

In this part of Tennessee, people love Nathan Bedford Forrest. We kept seeing his face going by on t-shirts and showing up on commemorative posters and books in the tents. Controversial around the South these days, Forrest is still something of a hero in his native Tennessee.  Historian Thomas Cartwright (our favorite speaker at the event) told stories of Forrest’s bravery and raw military genius, how he would scoff at West Pointers and too-hesitant generals, how he and his calvary could whip a Yankee force twice their size.

“Look up Brice’s Crossroads!” Cartwright told us as he was getting low on time.  Later on, when a military chaplain re-enactor gave an 1860s-style sermon on David and Goliath, it was hard not to think of Forrest and his men at Brice’s Crossroads.

The Battle of Thompson’s Station took place on March 5th, 1863, a year before Fort Pillow and a few years before Forrest’s affiliations with the KKK. In 1863, he was just a Confederate hero, helping to save the day in his home country by approaching the enemy from behind and capturing their command.

150 years (and a few days) later, a few thousand people got the chance to walk the land where the battle took place. Living history camps were set up on the grounds, and in the distance cannons fired.  Historical figures mingled with locals, horses tromped by food trucks, and somewhere on the outskirts Abraham Lincoln stood with his Yankee entourage, looking appropriately solemn and towering above the crowds.










Posted in Civil War, Events, History, Tennessee | 5 Comments

A Ghost Resort at Cascade Springs

Thursday, February 28, 2013

“Cascade Springs are situated six and one-half miles from the heart of Atlanta, on Cascade Road. Here nature has established one of the most attractive resorts in Georgia. Beautiful Cascades blend perfectly with rugged scenery, making the ensemble one of pleasing surroundings and refreshing coolness. The Cascade Springs Park and Camping Co. have done much to add to the general appearance of the place, and beg to announce to the public that they will find a most delightful place to spend a day, week, month or summer.” 1  

In (or sometime around) 1916, Atlanta’s Cascade Springs was relatively simple to get to. Brochures listed driving directions for early motorists, spelling out street names that are still here (Cascade, Lee) and some that have long since been changed (Whitehall, Gordon).  Auto Buses on the West End line made special trips to the springs at least seven times a day.

Today, Cascade Springs isn’t so easy to find.  I live less than ten miles away from the place, but only came across it accidentally the other night when I was bored and randomly pulling up parks on Google Maps.  Cascade Springs is a city park, though I couldn’t find an official website for it.  Instead I found blog posts and book excerpts, but just a photo of that stone springhouse alone was enough to make me want to go and check it out for myself.

Reading about its Civil War history also made me want to take a trip to the springs.  The Battle of Utoy Creek, fought in 1864, was a Confederate victory.  Some of the fighting happened right under the falls, and a few trenches can still be seen in the hills above.  Of course, the Federals ended up taking Atlanta anyhow, and so after the war and during Reconstruction the area was pretty much forgotten.

In the early 1900s, entrepreneur John Zaring bought up land around Utoy Creek in hopes to make some money.  He went to work advertising the springs’ magical healing powers: “Anyone suffering from rheumatism, consiptation, indigestion, kidney and bowel troubles as well as insomnia, and nervousness should drink large quantities of Cascade Spring water.”2 Then he put a dance pavilion right below the falls and a big inn on one of the hills above it. Guests could stay at the inn or in furnished canvas bungalow tents, provided that they were “ladies and gentlemen” and could give character references. The inn’s restaurant served up “old-fashioned home cooking,” specializing in fried chicken dinners for 75 cents and afternoon tea for a quarter.

The resort didn’t last long: supposedly the inn closed down around the 1920s, and by the time the Great Depression hit Cascade Springs was mainly a daytrip picnic park, with a mini golf course and tennis court.3 Zaring’s family continued to sell their spring water up until the 1950s, and in the ’70s the city bought the land for use as a park.

Most of the resort’s buildings are gone now.  There are a few ruins, including part of the inn’s foundation near the park entrance.  The small stone springhouse looks just as it must have in the early 1900s, with its moss-covered outer walls and its charmingly off-kilter window. And then there are the falls.  The dance pavilion is long-gone, and traffic noise from above now competes with the sound of rushing water, but the waterfall looks just as it does in old resort photos, and just as it must have during the Battle of Utoy Creek.








Posted in Georgia, History, Parks | 8 Comments