Piedmont’s story has a humble start

Piedmont Hospital’s humble beginnings can be traced to a Jewish immigrant from Austria-Hungary specializing in gastrointestinal disease.

Dr. Ludwig Amster and his wife Fannie founded Amster Sanitarium in 1904 to treat stomach and intestinal disorders in a grand, 15-room brick-and-stone home on Capitol Avenue.

One year later, he partnered with Dr. Floyd McRae, an abdominal surgeon, changing the name to Piedmont Sanitarium with a bit of a broader scope — medical and surgical needs.

The landmark home called the Swift House, was located at 267 Capital Avenue, which today is approximately the site of the former Atlanta Fulton County Stadium.

Piedmont began with just eight rooms and three doctors — Dr. James Edgar Paullin was the third.

It grew rapidly as medicine transitioned from home remedies, healers and almshouses to more advanced practices. It acquired all the properties on its block and used the houses for nurses’ dormitories. In 1922, it built a five-story annex. In 1925, the board changed the name to Piedmont Hospital.

In 1944, the board approved the purchase of 11 acres on the corner of Peachtree and Collier roads for $60,000; land Jack J. Spalding had purchased from the Collier family, the original owners.

The wife of Dr. Floyd McRae was a Collier descendant. Mr. Spalding was the founding partner of the law firm King & Spalding and among Atlanta’s leading residents. He called his home Deerland.

Progress necessitated the move. The hospital did not have air conditioning and had grown to its maximum capacity. The area around the hospital was deteriorating as well.

On Nov. 29, 1954, ground was broken on a $5 million, 217-bed hospital on the Spalding property. John W. Vaught designed the six-story facility with four wings, nine operating rooms, three delivery rooms and two emergency rooms. An aerial view of the hospital looked like a cross, perhaps influencing the recently retired logo; a light blue cross.

Meanwhile, the old hospital was still up and running. The Atlanta Housing Authority eventually purchased it as the city eyed the land for a new municipal stadium. On March 26, 1957, 15 ambulances moved the 64 patients 10 miles to the new hospital.

The patients and the staff had breakfast on Capitol Avenue and lunch on Peachtree Road.

The modern history of Piedmont is better known. The hospital has continued to grow. Today the Buckhead campus is one of five hospitals operating under the Piedmont banner. Practically every square inch of its Buckhead campus has been used to offer more services to more patients to the point where someone like myself, who was born there — and who worked there for a summer as a college student, and whose children were born there — still needs to stop and ask directions when inside.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention my grandmother, Mrs. Gina Kennedy, who chaired the first two Piedmont Balls, the principal fundraiser for the hospital, which Town & Country magazine called “one of the most successful charity balls in the country” at the time.

Tragic story of first head Buckhead Baseball umpire nearly forgotten

For over a decade, a plaque hung in the concession stand at Buckhead Baseball that read, “Hoyle Dye; A Friend of Boys.”

It disappeared many years ago, according to Ray Mock, whose father, Jim Mock, was one of the founders of the youth baseball program. With it, generations of coaches, players and supporters never learned the tragic story of the first head umpire of Buckhead Baseball.

Since 1952 Buckhead Baseball has been teaching the game to generations of young boys on the fields of Frankie Allen Park on Pharr Road.

One of the first names associated with the program is Dye’s. He was an outstanding athlete at Boys High School in the 1930s and played baseball professionally as a catcher in Richmond, Va., before World War II. After his playing days were over, Dye began refereeing sports as a way to spend time with his son, Robert. He officiated high school and little league football, basketball and baseball games. He was the first head umpire for Buckhead Baseball.

He was also an outstanding police officer.

On Nov. 9, 1960, his hobby and his profession intersected with terrible consequences.

According to the local newspaper report, Dye switched shifts that day so that he could umpire a game that evening. Just after noon, he and his partner J.R. Weldon received a call about a suspect who had beaten his sister. The brother, George Gray, had left the scene and a judge issued a warrant for his arrest.

The officers went to the house and got a description of Gray. Their search led them to a corner grill at the intersection of Northside Drive and Simpson Street. As Weldon talked to the owner, Dye walked to one of the booths in the back, where a man was sitting alone. Weldon said he heard Dye ask a question when suddenly the man jumped to his feet, drew a gun and shot Officer Dye. Weldon was able to hit the suspect several times, but he fled the scene.

Dye died on the way to Grady Hospital.

Weldon apprehended the killer a short time later. He showed no remorse in the killing of the popular Buckhead Baseball umpire. He told officers he was minding his own business when the officer started asking him questions.

Perhaps Buckhead Baseball will one day find that old plaque in a store room somewhere, and the real story of Hoyle Dye – police officer, first head baseball umpire and a ‘friend of boys’ – will regain its rightful place.

Bagley grew black community in heart of Buckhead

William Bagley courtesy Buckhead Heritage Society

It is a bit of a blessing William Bagley did not live to see what became of his beloved community in Buckhead in the mid-1900s.

The events that brought him to the area were much more heinous than what Fulton County did to get rid of the all-black neighborhood off Pharr Road beginning in 1945, but it would have marked the second time he was forced from land he owned on account of the color of his skin.

Bagley’s story was narrated by his granddaughter, Elon Butts Osby, to the Buckhead Heritage Society, a transcript of which is available on the nonprofit’s website. Osby’s mother Willie Mae Bagley was born in Macedonia Park, a black community comprised of about 400 families spread over 21 acres in the heart of Buckhead.

Though the community dated back to the 1870s, white developer John Owens formally incorporated it as Macedonia Park in 1921 by building several modest homes on small lots. Two grocery stores, two churches and a blacksmith served the neighborhood.

The earliest record of William Bagley is in 1870, when he was just 3 years old living in Forsyth County, according to Nasir Muhammad, who operates black history tours throughout Atlanta. This is an important piece of information and is directly related to his turning up in Buckhead four decades later.

As recounted by his granddaughter, a terrible crime was committed in Forsyth County in 1912. Two black males were accused of raping a white woman. When the community learned of the allegations, it turned against the black residents. The result was the largest exodus of African Americans in the history of the country, according to Muhammad.

As much as 98 percent of blacks living in Forsyth Country were forced to leave as white mobs set fire to homes and murdered innocent men, women and children. The violence spread to the surrounding counties as well. In some areas every black resident fled fearing for their lives, never to return.

Bagley was one of them. According to his granddaughter, he had to abandon 84 acres in Forsyth County. He relocated his family to Macedonia Park. Osby has heard her grandfather operated a grocery store there, but she said that came from people outside of her family.

Her family knew their grandfather to be a businessman. In 1928 a security note shows he purchased six lots in the subdivision for $2,100. Osby recounted a story of her grandfather going to the corner of Peachtree and Paces Ferry roads, where soldiers frequently gathered, and bringing back the scraps of what had been fed to the horses.

Osby’s mother and father owned a popular rib shack in Macedonia Park, which became known as Bagley Park. She said she thinks her grandfather’s name became associated the community because he was an educated man who rose to be a leader and the unofficial “mayor.” Muhammad said the Bagleys worked tirelessly to create a model black community. Bagley died in 1939 and his wife Ida in 1945.

The rest of the story is pretty well known. As Buckhead grew, white communities encroached on Macedonia Park. There were complaints about crime, noise and pollution. The Ku Klux Klan made regular threatening appearances.

According to a history of Bagley/Frankie Allen Park by Susan Conger, Fulton County passed an ordinance publicly condemning the community.

Between 1945 and 1953 the county acquired all of the lots either by purchase or eminent domain. Land owners were given anywhere from nothing to $5,000. Osby’s mother, the daughter of William Bagley, and father were among the residents forced from their property.

The county destroyed the community and created a public park, calling it Bagley Park. That was the lone concession the county made, that the park would bear the name of William Bagley, Osby said. In 1980 the name was changed to honor Allen, a beloved Buckhead Baseball umpire. Bagley’s name adorns the lone street running through the park.

Read more: Neighbor Newspapers – Column Bagley grew black community in heart of Buckhead

Vinings ‘playhouse’ was artist’s canvas

Ellie Mae Rowe, courtesy Black Art in America

I remember the house well. It was on the right side of Paces Ferry Road in Vinings if you were headed west. The fence was covered with worn and weathered stuffed animals; cans and bottles hung from the trees in the front yard from string.

It didn’t look like art. It looked like trash. It looked junky and unkept, even scary to a young person. I didn’t know who lived there. Even though my mother was herself an artist and collected folk pieces she never told me about Nellie Mae Rowe.

Rowe festooned her three-room house near the railroad tracks with homemade dolls, found objects and just about anything that caught her eye. Just like Howard Finster, the man who created the famous Paradise Garden in Summerville, Nellie Mae Rowe was a deeply religious, self-taught artist who saw beauty in things others did not. Just like Finster’s eclectic outdoor folk art Mecca, Rowe used her home and her property to express herself.

Born in 1900 to a father who had been a slave, she was raised in Fayette County on a rented farm. Rowe and her nine brothers and sisters spent much of their youth working in the fields. She learned to sew as well, but she loved more than anything laying on the floor of their home and drawing pictures. In a short documentary about her life by Linda Armstrong, Rowe said drawing pictures is all that she wanted to do when she was a child. She also made dolls out of old rags and discarded quilts. She would tie them in a way to create a head, arms and legs and draw eyes on them. She played with them every day. Her family did not like it, though, and told her to stop. She did it anyway.

Rowe moved with her first husband, Ben Wheat, to Vinings in 1930. He died in 1936, and later that year she married a man named Henry “Buddy” Rowe. She and Buddy Rowe built the small house with a screened-in front porch on Paces Ferry Road, back when Vinings was out in the country.

After her second husband died in 1948, Rowe did not remarry. She did housework to support herself but she always created. Over time, her house went from being her home to her “playhouse.” That is what she called it.

Behind a fence was a shallow yard, and just about every inch of it had something to see. She saw beauty in things people no longer wanted. She took discarded items from the side of the road and turned them into works of art accenting her yard and house. She made sculptures out of chewing gum. She hung things off the porch and the trees. The lone constant was color — nearly everything she collected had a brightness to it, or at least at one point it did.

In her back yard she kept a garden, but it, too, was joined by the myriad of found objects that drew her eye. She spent her days drawing, “placing” things, making her dolls and singing old hymns.

People slowed down when they drove past her house. Her yard in many ways was a work of art itself, an extension of this colorful, eclectic, self-taught artist.

For those curious enough to approach, Rowe was always welcoming and even invited people into her home, where she played her electric piano and sang as they gawked at the wall-to-wall artwork, statues, decorations of all kinds, drawings, family pictures and dolls. Her artwork was bursting with color, done with crayons and markers on sheets of paper.

She was “discovered” in 1976, when the Atlanta History Center in Buckhead presented an exhibit that included her work. Upon seeing it, gallery owner and artist champion Judith Alexander reached out to Rowe. The two became friends and Alexander became Rowe’s art dealer. She exhibited her work at Alexander’s Buckhead gallery, and then she was off to a show in New York. Over the next several years, many exhibitions across the country featured Rowe’s work.

By the time success found her, however, she had weathered hands and referred to herself as an old woman. Rowe died in 1982.

Today her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, the American Folk Museum in New York and many others. Her Vinings playhouse, perhaps her greatest work, has been lost to time.

Read more: Neighbor Newspapers – Column Vinings playhouse served as artist s canvas

Foursome broke color barrier at Bobby Jones

Alfred “Tup” Holmes, Georgia Golf Hall of Fame

On an ordinary spring day in 1951 Billy Wilson, the general manager of Bobby Jones Golf Course, took payment from K.B. Hill thinking nothing of the individual wanting to play the city of Atlanta-owned amenity.

Wilson couldn’t have known Hill was a plant. A black man whose complexion was so light he was often mistaken for white, Hill was allowed to play a whites-only golf course in Buckhead.

The jig was up when a foursome arrived a short time later. They were all African-American. With their clubs in tow they went to the counter and attempted to pay to play the course.

Some unkind and unprintable words were spoken and they were told to leave. Their response? Why, they had just seen a black man playing Bobby Jones Golf Course. That man was Hill.

The ruse led to the first court-ordered desegregation in the state of Georgia four years later.

The course was built on land owned by developer Eugene Haynes and the city of Atlanta in 1932. It was a result of the surging popularity of golf and the world’s most famous player at the time, Buckhead Bobby Jones. Architects Wayne Stiles and John R. Van Kleek designed the 18-hole course, which opened to the public in 1933. Jones himself played his namesake course twice.

The Civil Rights Movement was in its infancy in 1951, when four well-known and accomplished African-American golfers hatched a plan to play the Jones course. The foursome consisted of Dr. Hamilton Holmes, who had a family medical practice in downtown Atlanta; his son, a well-respected minster named Oliver Wendell Holmes; his other son, Alfred “Tup” Holmes, an accomplished golfer who served as a union steward at Lockheed Aircraft; and friend Charles T. Bell.

After Hill had been retrieved from the course that spring day, all five were kicked off the premises. After much consideration and planning, Tup Holmes sued the city of Atlanta, Mayor William B. Hartsfield and Wilson, the course general manager. In the case Holmes vs. Atlanta, the courts ruled in favor of the city several times, but Holmes seemingly achieved a minor victory when a district court in Atlanta ruled blacks could play the course only on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Separate but not-quite-equal was not the goal, however, and the compromise was rejected. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The attorney who eventually took over Holmes’ case was none other than Thurgood Marshall. The Supreme Court agreed with Holmes and Atlanta’s public golf courses were desegregated by law Nov. 7, 1955. Of course Marshall would go on to become the first African-American justice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The group of golfers had intended to celebrate by playing Bobby Jones that next day but they did not. Threats had been made against them. Instead they played North Fulton Golf Course at Chastain Park without incident, but later they did play the course that had led to the historic decision. As a point of historic interest, Atlanta Public Schools would not become integrated for another six years. Holmes vs. Atlanta was the first court-ordered desegregation in the state of Georgia.

Read more:  Neighbor Newspapers – Column Foursome broke color barrier at Bobby Jones

African-American cemetery nearly forgotten on Vinings hillside

For many years civic clubs, Boy Scouts and local students gathered in Vinings Cemetery at Halloween to clear debris, right fallen tombstones and pick up trash.

It was the perfect time of year to spend a few hours among the seemingly abandoned grave markers, some of which have been rendered unreadable by time, the raised lettering worn away.

Vinings Cemetery sits on a wooded hillside between Paces Ferry Road and the maroon-hued Paces West office buildings. Markers precariously teeter on the steep slope. Several have fallen over. Some of the graves sites have collapsed, which happens when a coffin decays to the point that the earth falls in on it, leaving a distinct depression in the ground.

Vinings Cemetery was connected to both New Salem African Methodist Church and Mount Sinai Baptist Church. These churches supported black communities in the area that dated back to the turn of the last century. Late author and historian Anthony Doyle said slaves were brought to Vinings during the Civil War to build the Confederate fortifications. When the war ended some of the freed slaves remained in the area, finding employment as farmers and domestic help. These are the families that built the two churches and whose remains are now interred in Vinings Cemetery.

Some of the graves are recent. I found a marker for a man named Willie North dated 1990, but others go back to the 1890s. In the center is a small monument marking the final resting place of Milton McAfee, who was born May 3, 1886 and died Oct. 8, 1918. On the marker is the square and compass of the Freemasons.

There was no cleanup this past Halloween. The group did such an excellent job of cleaning it up over several years that they found they didn’t have much to do a few years ago and the tradition faded. But now it does need some help. Nature has begun to exert her will; groundcover is creeping ever closer to the markers and tree branches and debris have fallen on the grave sites.

The disappointing thing is there is nothing to mark this cemetery, to tell passerby and the curious what it is, why it is there or who is buried there.

Vinings “Ski” Slope Was an Interesting Ride

In  the 1970s Atlanta had an actual ski slope, called the Vinings Ridge Ski Area, with no fresh powder to be found. It wasn’t snow. It wasn’t even cold. It was a hillside covered with synthetic turf and plastic pellets that rolled under the skis, giving the sensation of swooshing through small plastic pebbles on a synthetic ski slope.

Read more:  Neighbor Newspapers – Column Vinings ski resort skewed concept of snow

Equitable Columns on Permanent Display at History Center

When it was completed in 1892, the original Equitable office building was the tallest in Atlanta. It was also considered the first “modern” office building, though I haven’t a clue what that means. Among the distinguishing characteristics of that 19th century structure were 18 marble Corinthian columns, which supported it. When the building was demolished in 1971, some of the columns were saved; some remained downtown, others made their way to Columns Drive, where a real estate developer used them as an historic attraction of sorts, naming his new development The Columns. They were all but forgotten until the original owners found out about them. 

Now three of 20,000-pound columns can be found at the Atlanta History Center in Buckhead.

In this image from the Atlanta History Center you can see the columns at the base of the original Equitable Building, which was Atlanta’s first modern office building.

Continue reading: Neighbor Newspapers – Historic columns found a home in Buckhead

Howell’s mills, Moore’s mill gave rise to popular roads

The original of this famous painting is hanging in the Millennium Gate, 385 17th Street.

In “Atlanta and Environs,” Franklin Garrett theorized more people know of Judge Clark Howell’s mill than ever “made use of its facilities.” That is because of Howell Mill Road, which takes its name from the historic mill.

Judge Clark Howell had served in Atlanta’s young city council but moved out from the city in 1852, when he purchased land along Peachtree Creek and established his mills. One was a grist mill, the other a sash-sawmill. Grist is simply grain that has been separated from the chaff, but it can also be grain that has been ground in a mill and used to make flour or corn meal. A sash-sawmill is a particular type of saw used in the cutting of wood. Rather than a circular or band blade, a sash saw has vertical blades that move up and down. It takes its name from the apparatus which holds it together, which looks a bit like a window sash.

The mills were located about 1,000 yards to the west of the bridge on Howell Mill Road spanning the creek. They were on the northern bank of the creek in a low-lying area. They were twice destroyed by fire, the final time in 1879 when they were not rebuilt. Judge Clark Howell passed away just three years later at the age of 71.

The Howell’s mill became the center of the community when it became a United States Post Office in 1876. Howell served as the first post master. He earned the title “judge” for his service on the Fulton County Inferior Court.

Thomas Moore had problems of a combustable nature as well. His grist mill burned to the ground in 1861, but was rebuilt that same year. Moore’s mill was also on Peachtree Creek just above the confluence with Nancy Creek. He purchased the land around the Bolton neighbor in 1850 and built his mill in 1854. It operated until 1901, when it ceased operations because of its owner’s generosity it would seem.

In 1892, Moore donated the right of way to the city of Atlanta for a water plant. Just nine years later his mill was deemed “untenable” as a result of waste water from the city’s sewage disposal system.

The circumstances that surrounded the death of Thomas Moore also pointed to Atlanta’s continuing growth. On April 2, 1914 he was thrown from his buggy when an interurban car – think of a tram on the railroad tracks – startled his horse. He died from injuries sustained in the fall.

Eerie 19th Century Buckhead Murders Never Solved

Well-liked and well-respected in the community, it was difficult to think of anyone harming Susan & Martin DeFoor.

On the morning of July 26, 1879, Martin Walker noticed something was amiss at the home of his grandparents, which was just across the road from his home. Susan DeFoor was 81 years old and her husband Martin a sturdy 73. They operated a ferry across the Chatahoochee River, which bore their name. It appeared no one was up at 6:30 in the morning, which was unusual. Walking around the back of the two-story country house, Walker noticed a back door was open. Inside he found his axe, one that he had left near his wood pile at his home. It was in the fireplace, ashes covering the blade. In the front bedroom he found his grandparents laying side by side, nearly decapitated by blows from that very axe. There was no sign of struggle.

Read more: Neighbor Newspapers – Murder of elderly couple sent shockwaves through community