The 1960s Antebellum Plantation at Stone Mountain, Georgia Free

Stone Mountain has long attracted attention as a natural wonder. One nineteenth-century writer called it “a tall and conspicuous eminence … [that] produces an impression of wildness and grandeur, difficult to describe.”⁸ Another observer recorded it as “a precipice of seventeen hundred feet, whose awful altitude makes the brain dizzy, and compared with which Niagara is but a plaything.”⁹ While the gently sloping south elevation offered visitors an easy climb to the top and an expansive view, the steep north elevation was more forbidding, inspiring awe in the sightseers at its base.

In the early twentieth century, the mountain became the focus of a series of efforts to create an extraordinary shrine to Confederate memory and White supremacy. These activities coincided with the successful codification of Jim Crow laws across the South and an associated surge of interest in building Confederate monuments that peaked around 1910. In 1914, attorney William H. Terrell proposed in a letter to the Atlanta Constitution that Stone Mountain be acquired as public property and transformed into a Confederate memorial, with a park at its base and a temple for relics placed at the summit. Caroline Helen Jemison Plane, a Confederate widow and first president of the Georgia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, voiced her approval, and the 1915 premiere of the film The Birth of a Nation, with its sympathetic portrayal of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan, galvanized public support. With the assistance of the UDC, Plane brought Gutzon Borglum (future sculptor of Mount Rushmore) to Atlanta to meet with Samuel Venable, the owner of Stone Mountain and an advocate for the memorial. On 25 November 1915, Venable participated in a cross-burning ritual at the summit that reinvigorated the Klan and forever linked it to the mountain.¹⁰

After much planning and the disruption of World War I, Borglum finally began carving the UDC-sponsored memorial in 1923. The project quickly faltered, because of personal conflicts, funding shortfalls, and technical challenges. Borglum’s spectacular design featuring hundreds of massive cavalry figures proved impossible to execute, even with the help of profits from the U.S. Mint’s issuance of a commemorative Stone Mountain Memorial half dollar in 1925. That same year the UDC fired Borglum, who promptly destroyed his models and left the state. Work on his design came to a permanent halt in 1928. Left incomplete, the “sublime eminence” now featured a partial bas-relief sculpture of Robert E. Lee mounted on horseback amid scars wrought by chisels and dynamite (Figure 3).¹¹

The memorial languished until the 1950s, when Georgia’s defenders of racial segregation seized upon the mountain’s symbolic potential in their effort to resist the ascendant civil rights movement. During the Georgia gubernatorial race of 1954—begun soon after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled “separate but equal” public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education—future governor Marvin Griffin promised not only to keep the state’s schools segregated but also to purchase and develop Stone Mountain.¹² Even though Griffin admitted that “the dreamy romantic old way of cotton plantations is gone forever,” he defended “the Georgia way of life” and attacked federal efforts to desegregate schools as “the second reconstruction of the South.”¹³ In 1956, the same year he joined other southern governors in a pledge to fight integration, Griffin signed into law the adoption of a new state flag that incorporated the Confederate battle flag. Confederate imagery and valorization functioned as publicity tools of the massive resistance strategy against integration, succinctly connecting White supremacist, antifederal politics with a historical narrative of southern honor, heroism, and defiance. In 1958, Griffin signed off on the creation of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, a new state agency that would oversee the acquisition of the mountain and the completion of “a perpetual memorial to the Confederacy” and recreation area.¹⁴ Like all of Georgia’s public parks, Stone Mountain Park would be segregated, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s upholding of lower court decisions that such laws were unconstitutional.¹⁵

This surge of Confederate commemoration in Georgia dovetailed with celebrations planned across the South for the forthcoming Civil War centennial in 1961. Local and state efforts to honor the Confederacy’s heroic struggle to defend itself against an aggressive and intrusive federal government legitimated contemporary acts of resistance and discrimination by southern state legislatures. Parades and reenactments with costumed Confederates, new monuments, and the flying of Confederate battle flags at state capitols defied recent civil rights victories and insisted that the battle over race in the United States was far from finished.¹⁶

While the idea of a completed Confederate monument at Stone Mountain offered an effective tool for propaganda, the reality of acquiring the mountain and adjacent property, creating a park, and finishing the long-abandoned memorial presented a series of herculean tasks for the new SMMA. Governor Griffin and the state legislature populated the SMMA with powerful figures to safeguard the state’s significant investment in the site. By law, the SMMA’s seven-member board included four ex officio seats for Georgia’s secretary of state, attorney general, commissioner of agriculture, and public service commissioner. In 1958, these were, respectively, Benjamin W. Fortson Jr., Eugene Cook, J. Phil Campbell Jr., and Matthew L. McWhorter, who served as the board’s first chair. Griffin appointed the three remaining members, who represented the mix of political, economic, and cultural objectives tied up in the project: Scott Candler, secretary of commerce; S. Price Gilbert Jr., retired vice president of Coca-Cola; and Doris Walker Lyle, president of the Georgia Division of the UDC.¹⁷ The legislature gave the group broad powers, including the ability “to acquire, by purchase, lease or otherwise, and to hold, lease and dispose of in any manner, real and personal property of every kind and character for its corporate purposes.”¹⁸ So long as it ensured the key memorial and recreational purposes of the park, the SMMA could exercise creative control over the project’s design.

Yet the enormity of the work proved too much for the SMMA, and it immediately began to consider ways to outsource responsibilities and offset expenses. The association faced not only severe financial constraints but also a daunting list of infrastructure improvements (including the relocation of a highway through the property), as well as the engineering and artistic challenges posed by the unfinished monument.¹⁹ Seeking guidance, in 1958 the SMMA engaged Atlanta architecture and engineering firm Robert and Company Associates to produce a master plan. The firm emphasized the need to construct facilities that would generate much-needed revenue, arguing that “the desire to pay homage to the Confederate leaders is still important, but it is now probably secondary to the economic motive.”²⁰ Heeding this advice, the SMMA prioritized the construction of a lake, scenic drives, and picnic areas over historical or commemorative programs. By the summer of 1959, the SMMA also decided “to lease out on concession all major items” by inviting private investors to create and operate most park attractions.²¹ While the SMMA retained some control over the operation and funding of the concessions, it assigned the responsibility for any storytelling that might accompany the memorial to these private vendors.

The piecemeal and often disorganized public–private construction that took place at Stone Mountain Park meant that a unified park narrative centered on the Lost Cause failed to emerge. The hodgepodge of concessions approved by the cash-strapped SMMA (including an antique car museum, a game ranch and petting zoo, a Polynesian-themed marina, and a scenic railroad with mock Indian raids) communicated no coordinated message, beyond the need to attract tourist dollars. In the meantime, the status of the park’s would-be main attraction—the Stone Mountain Memorial—remained uncertain. As the SMMA found itself barraged with an ever-increasing amount of work, it left the monument’s narrative scheme, its configuration, and even its precise location undecided. As late as 1962, the SMMA considered abandoning the 1920s-era sculpture entirely to undertake new work elsewhere on the mountain. The question of what shape and style the memorial would take—abstract or representational, modern or a continuation of Lost Cause monument traditions—lingered as the SMMA belatedly invited a group of artists to submit proposals for its completion.²² As efforts to create the Confederate memorial limped along, Stone Mountain Park became more a theme park than a coherent site of remembrance.

An open-air plantation complex for paying guests to explore numbered among the first concessions approved by the SMMA. The association anticipated that such an attraction would draw visitors to the park, generate revenue, and complement the memorial, regardless of the design the SMMA ultimately chose. The complex would also fill a major void in Georgia’s emerging heritage tourism landscape. With no historic plantations regularly open to the public in the state at midcentury, a re-created plantation at Stone Mountain Park would appeal to the expanding market for plantation tourism, already well developed in the South Carolina Lowcountry as well as along Louisiana’s River Road, at Virginia’s James River, and in Natchez, Mississippi.²³

The SMMA’s early discussions about an invented antebellum historic site centered on attracting fans of a particular southern plantation: Tara, the fictional Georgia home of Scarlett O’Hara, heroine of Gone with the Wind (Figure 4). In April 1958, SMMA member Price Gilbert Jr. suggested constructing a Margaret Mitchell memorial at Stone Mountain, an idea that over time members connected to a separate proposal for a museum housed inside a replica of “Tara Hall.” Re-creating Tara provided an obvious—almost default—version of the antebellum past for the park. Even just the façade of the house delivered a rapid-fire message about the glory of the Old South, catering to the White audiences who dreamed of inhabiting Tara. Both Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1936 novel and the 1939 blockbuster film employed the house as a key protagonist. The mansion showcased Scarlett’s style and privilege as a southern belle, the lighthearted interactions between enslaved characters such as Mammy and Prissy and their White “family,” and the plundering of the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction.²⁴

Yet re-creating Tara posed numerous challenges. Would this be the Tara of the novel or the film? The movie set did not match the big house described in the book. Mitchell imagined Tara as a typical, unpretentious planter’s dwelling of the Georgia up-country, a “clumsy, sprawling building.” She begged David O. Selznick, the producer of the film, to leave it “ugly” and “columnless.”²⁵ Selznick nevertheless insisted on a more marketable white-columned façade that evoked the classical grandeur that literature, cinema, and historic sites had long conditioned the public to associate with southern plantations.²⁶ Stephens Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s brother and administrator of her estate, anticipated that the SMMA likewise would not be able to resist the appeal of white columns. When he gave his tepid approval for the use of his sister’s name on a Stone Mountain building, he made a point of noting that the name Tara should not “be used in connection with some fine example of Greek Revival architecture. It was a simple country dwelling.”²⁷

The arrival of the Tara movie set in Atlanta only affirmed the SMMA’s initial impulse to re-create Georgia’s most famous—if imaginary—building. Consigned for decades to the back lot of Selznick International Pictures in Culver City, California, Tara’s remains rolled up in front of the Georgia State Capitol in two vans on 1 June 1959, the newly acquired property of Atlanta real estate developer Julian M. Foster. The SMMA met the same day in the State Agriculture Building on Capitol Square and likely witnessed (and even joined in) the homecoming festivities, which included the governor, Miss Atlanta, and a Dixieland band. In his comments at the event, Governor Ernest Vandiver, the newly elected successor to Governor Griffin, acknowledged the special place of the house in the collective memory of Georgians, one that hovered between fantasy and reality: “Even though we know that Tara is a fictional, not a real plantation, it is a reality to many and it is with a great deal of pride and pleasure that we welcome Tara home.” Foster planned to use the set pieces to rebuild Tara as a complete house with interiors on a site in nearby Clayton County. The “reassembled” house would then be the centerpiece of a re-created Tara plantation with cotton fields and vegetable gardens. Finally, Tara would exist, its gates open to visitors eager to experience the famous home from Gone with the Wind. But reconstructing Tara was easier said than done. The filmmakers had relied on sets built on soundstages for interior scenes, and the exterior shell survived only in salvaged, weather-worn fragments. Ultimately the project proved too daunting for Foster, who consigned Tara’s celebrated relics to storage.²⁸

While Foster’s Tara promised the white-columned vision of southern mythology, another plantation house scheduled for reassembly in Atlanta presented a vernacular alternative of earlier vintage. The Redman Thornton House, an unusually intact late eighteenth-century Georgia residence from Union Point, Greene County, was a “simple country dwelling” much closer to the homely farmhouse Mitchell had imagined for the Tara of her novel (Figure 5). The Atlanta Art Association (AAA, precursor to the High Museum of Art) purchased the house in 1958 after discovering it during a search for period paneling with which to display a roll of Sauvages de la Mer du Pacifique, a celebrated early nineteenth-century scenic wallpaper by French manufacturer Joseph Dufour et Cie.²⁹ Impressed with the structure’s craftsmanship and unaltered state, the AAA opted to move it to the grounds of the association’s headquarters on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta, where it would be preserved as a museum and gallery for the AAA’s growing collection of period southern furniture. This project was an explicit rebuttal of the uncritical approach to southern history epitomized by Foster’s planned reconstruction of Tara. Unlike the white-columned stereotype, the Thornton House was an unclassical, asymmetrical, one-and-a-half-story building. AAA president Sarah Broadnax Hansell remarked that “we hope to reemphasize Georgia’s long past—back beyond the White Column period—and to acquaint people with our early plantation life.”³⁰ The AAA set the house in a garden with brick paths and opened it to the public in December 1960.³¹ The association planned to further simulate an early plantation complex by adding authentic outbuildings. Antiques magazine featured the site in 1962, calling the house “an outstanding example of the early architectural pattern of the Piedmont region of Georgia” and emphasizing the scholarly achievement of its curation.³²

Amid the buzz of these two projects, the SMMA voted to broaden its idea for a Tara replica into an open-air, historical plantation complex. Speaking at a meeting of the SMMA, Chairman McWhorter proposed making the Margaret Mitchell memorial “a complete southern plantation house with gardens, slave quarters, sugarcane mill, etc., so the northern and southern tourists could be reminded of the way people lived on plantations during the Civil War.”³³ Shortly thereafter, the group added the Margaret Mitchell memorial plantation exhibit to the master plan for Stone Mountain Park.³⁴ The SMMA obviously felt that there was enough enthusiasm for Georgia plantation history that the exhibit could compete with Foster’s Tara and the AAA’s Thornton House. Given its limited resources, however, the SMMA knew that only private money could bring this idea to fruition.³⁵

As the AAA reassembled the Thornton House in Midtown Atlanta in April 1960, a pair of unlikely investors, Christie Bell Kennedy and Kenneth Garcia, appeared before the SMMA to present their idea for a plantation attraction at Stone Mountain. Their rough proposal ultimately became the Antebellum Plantation, which opened three years later as one of the first for-profit concessions at Stone Mountain Park. The SMMA, eager to see the plantation concept realized without having to oversee its construction or operation, readily relinquished control to Kennedy and Garcia, even if there was little in their respective backgrounds to suggest that they could successfully undertake such an endeavor. In doing so, the SMMA allowed the investors to discard the plantation’s proposed functions as a museum and memorial dedicated to Mitchell. The state still expected the plantation to educate visitors, but its primary purpose would be to entertain them.³⁶

No surviving records document how Kennedy and Garcia created their partnership and proposal, but their backstories illuminate their attraction to the project and the vision they created for it. Both Kennedy and Garcia came from rural working-class backgrounds. Born in Tifton, Georgia, Kennedy entered the power circles of Washington, D.C., when she became the personal secretary of Walter F. George, U.S. senator from Georgia, in the 1930s. In 1957, she moved to Atlanta when she married William Edward Mitchell, the retired president of Georgia Power (his second marriage, her third). There she met Florida native Kenneth Garcia, an antiques dealer known as a seller of fine English furniture and a kindred spirit who shared her love of antiques. Like Kennedy, Garcia had gained access to Atlanta high society by marrying into it. The plantation project offered the pair an opportunity to collaborate, generate revenue, and communicate their refined taste and well-connected status.³⁷

Kennedy and Garcia initially proposed an ambitious chronological assemblage of buildings collected from around the state that “would relate to the history of the early settlers in their simple log cabins … through the period prior to the Civil War.” Multiple houses with decorated interiors would demonstrate various periods, styles, and classes in the southern social hierarchy and offer a visual progression of southern civilization that would culminate with the plantation house as its highest achievement. Their proposal specified prospective historical buildings (including a gristmill, a round barn, and two blacksmith shops) as well as individual pieces and collections of furniture and decorative arts. Far from a cheap, ill-informed amusement park attraction, the concession Kennedy and Garcia imagined was comparable to what “the Atlanta Art Association is now doing behind the Museum”—that is, the Thornton House.³⁸

By describing the concession as “a permanent restoration of the Williamsburg Virginia type,” Kennedy and Garcia indicated that they planned an immersive experience rather than a stand-alone house museum, something not unlike what McWhorter had recently suggested to the SMMA. A “mule drawn cart or wagon” would offer rides to the plantation house, traveling along an “old weathered road with natural trees on each side.” Living props would include “ducks, turkey, geese and other fowl,” “costumed hostesses,” and “colored help … dressed in gay gingham costumes of the pre–civil war period.” If displays of furnishings and fabrics in the plantation house would likely attract a largely female audience, they hoped to entice men by including a gun and tack room featuring dueling pistols, Kentucky rifles, squirrel guns, and horse racing gear.³⁹

Kennedy and Garcia planned to engage the strategies used at Colonial Williamsburg and other historic sites in the first half of the twentieth century, skillfully combining authenticity with fantasy. Staged architecture and decorative arts would both educate and inspire guests, providing backdrops onto which visitors could project and perform collective memories of the past. Kennedy and Garcia asserted the historical legitimacy of their project by employing “real” buildings and objects, but, like the choices made by the architects of Williamsburg, their decisions about these reconstructions represented a negotiation between the historical evidence and their personal tastes and assumptions. The project obviously privileged the arrangement of architecture and interiors over a specific interpretive program, given that such a plantation had never existed at Stone Mountain. The cohesion or specificity of the narrative of the ensemble was ultimately less important than its ability to transport visitors back in time. And like most colonial revival presentations of the mid-twentieth century, the project created a historical space in which White people held power implicitly and without question.⁴⁰

In contrast to Colonial Williamsburg’s architects, who reconstructed the buildings and streets of Virginia’s colonial capital in situ, Kennedy and Garcia proposed selecting vernacular structures from across Georgia to create an entirely new “historic” place. This difference between the two sites thus exemplified what Edward P. Alexander, then director of interpretation for Colonial Williamsburg, identified as the two avenues for contemporary house museums: the plantation would feature artistic (or aesthetic) period rooms, while Williamsburg featured historical period rooms. Artistic rooms aimed “to exhibit in a tasteful manner outstanding examples of the interior architecture and decorative arts of a period,” whereas historical rooms “centered around the presentation of an actual room as it once appeared.” In Alexander’s words, both kinds of exhibits depended on the “fresh knowledge” of scholarly research and could “convey a sense of having been lived in through natural touches.”⁴¹

Kennedy and Garcia also sought to emulate Williamsburg by encouraging visitors to imagine themselves as consumers of fine architecture and decorative arts both in the past and in the present. Alongside its meticulously researched exhibits, Colonial Williamsburg had pioneered the licensing of reproduction historical furniture, textiles, paint colors, and other household goods. As evidenced by the colonial architectural details applied to buildings across the country, ranging from motels to suburban homes to the diminutively scaled Victorian Main Street of Disneyland (opened in 1955) had long proved to be tremendously marketable outside museum contexts as well. Kennedy and Garcia’s plantation promised to stimulate visitors who were seeking not just the beauty of the past but also ideas for decorating their own homes.⁴²

Determined to create an attraction that would foreground their knowledge and taste, Kennedy and Garcia rejected the SMMA’s idea of including a Margaret Mitchell memorial in their antebellum dreamland, arguing that it would detract from the “intended purpose” of the concession. However much the public associated Mitchell with the Old South, a didactic museum on the life and work of the deceased author would break the spell of being carried back in time and distract visitors from the careful staging of buildings and objects.⁴³ Regardless of their preference, Stephens Mitchell withdrew the possibility of using his sister’s name after learning of the “commercial activities” at the mountain.⁴⁴ As Mitchell explained to a reporter, “I told them if they had a honky-tonk in mind or one of these numerous Taras, I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”⁴⁵ Kennedy and Garcia’s proposal also made no mention of how their plantation would relate to the Stone Mountain monument, either aesthetically or ideologically. As the SMMA was still debating how to move forward with the abandoned sculpture, there was no specific future memorial to reference. Undoubtedly Kennedy and Garcia assumed their concession would dovetail ideologically with whatever design the SMMA chose to pursue.

In August 1961, after more than a year of characteristically sluggish negotiations, the SMMA voted unanimously to finalize a contract with Kennedy and Garcia. The agreement established a public–private partnership in which both sides contributed funds to an “ante bellum plantation park,” with the SMMA delegating most decision making to Kennedy and Garcia, now organized under the name Stone Mountain Plantation Inc. The state agreed to pay for the construction and/or relocation and restoration of fifteen structures, while Kennedy and Garcia would procure the buildings and oversee their “construction and decoration.” Stone Mountain Plantation Inc.’s primary expense was in this decoration, as Kennedy and Garcia had to outfit the buildings “in such manner as to reproduce as nearly as practicable the type and style of furniture, furnishings and draperies as were used immediately prior to 1860.” The parties agreed that these pieces would be “of quality comparable to that found in other restorations throughout the United States.” Revenues would come from visitor admissions (the state claimed one-third of gross admissions up to $75,000, and one-half after that), and Stone Mountain Plantation Inc. received permission to operate both a “country store” and an antique shop within the complex. Kennedy and Garcia agreed to pay the state 8 percent of sales from the country store and 20 percent of antique sales. Considering that the pair also would be paying the state at least $10,000 a year in rental expenses, they clearly expected the country store and antique shop to turn a significant profit.⁴⁶

The SMMA sought to populate Stone Mountain Park with attractions that would entice the public, generate revenue, and make history entertaining, and the Antebellum Plantation seemed to fit the bill. Not only would visitors enjoy exploring a simulated historic site, but the antebellum theme would also support the park’s purpose of Lost Cause commemoration. The promise of a high-quality “restoration” made dreams of a Confederate Williamsburg seem attainable. Kennedy and Garcia wanted to assemble beautiful interiors filled with light, color, and texture, spaces that would inspire visitors to buy their carefully selected goods or solicit their decorating services. All of this rested on the Georgia state government’s determination to prove to the world that the “southern way of life,” and by extension Jim Crow segregation, was somehow worth saving.

For Kennedy and Garcia, the Antebellum Plantation’s big house was the most critical part of the concession: its scale and style would communicate the tone of the entire attraction. It would not be a replica of Tara, but would it evoke the white-columned elegance of the Hollywood set or the up-country vernacular of Mitchell’s novel and the Thornton House? The SMMA probably expected Kennedy and Garcia to select a porticoed mansion, and they did consider the Gordon-Bowen-Blount House, a remarkably crafted early nineteenth-century dwelling standing near Haddock, Jones County (Figure 6). With its fluted columns, fanlights, and spiral staircase, this structure fit conventional expectations for a Georgia plantation house. Kennedy and Garcia may have learned of the Blount House through their architect, James Means, or through photographs of the house in two of the few architectural histories of Georgia then available, White Columns in Georgia, by Medora Field Perkerson (1952), and Early Architecture of Georgia, by Frederick Doveton Nichols (1957). However, the Blount House may have proven too expensive to move, or perhaps it was not for sale; either way, it never came to Stone Mountain.⁴⁷

Instead, Kennedy and Garcia selected the 1850s Davis-Plowden-Wilson House from Calhoun County in southwest Georgia (Figure 7). After transporting it more than 200 miles and refining its rough details, they made it the center of a newly invented landscape of outbuildings plucked from other locations. In “restoring” the house, Kennedy and Garcia stripped away its intertwined architectural and social histories, refashioning it as a stage for an ambiguous play about the grace and beauty of the Old South. To achieve this transformation, they relied on Means, a well-known designer of historicist houses in Georgia who had extensive experience with some of the state’s preeminent classicist firms.⁴⁸ Garcia and Means already had a close working relationship, with Garcia supplying many of the antique fixtures and elements of Means’s designs. Means created spaces that evoked tradition, but, as his biographer William R. Mitchell Jr. notes, “the goal was not what might be called scientific history” but rather “creative eclecticism.” He often employed salvaged materials (in some cases existing buildings) and architectural details in his designs to convey a sense of authenticity and texture.⁴⁹ By choosing a relatively modest, vernacular building that Means could freely manipulate and embellish, Kennedy and Garcia were able to attain both the authentically historical fabric and the flexible fantasy they wanted. In its altered form, the Davis House could evoke the believability of the Thornton House as well as the theatricality of the Hollywood Tara.

Prior to its removal to Stone Mountain, the Davis House embodied the history and social conditions of the cotton frontier of antebellum southwestern Georgia. Around 1849, cotton planter Charles Milton Davis took part in an extended family migration from Sumter County in South Carolina to lands in Georgia along Pachitla Creek in what would soon become Calhoun County.⁵⁰ Formerly Creek Indian territory, this region developed late in the antebellum period, and many of the slaveholding elite who established plantations there were absentee landlords. The Sumter County group gave up comfortable homes to personally settle the new frontier.⁵¹ In this remote location they sought to replicate their previous standard of living. The village of Whitney (now Dickey) became a community hub for Davis and his family and friends, and here they built a church and a school. The group prospered: the 1860 census reports them among Calhoun County’s wealthiest inhabitants. Of the top twenty slaveholders in the county, five were members of the Sumter party. Charles Davis was the third-largest slaveholder in the county, owning seventy-eight slaves and 3,500 acres.⁵²

The house Davis commissioned immediately west of Whitney projected his affluence as well as the particularities of his circumstances and location. Either out of necessity or for the sake of convenience, Davis employed a capable yet unsophisticated local builder. The house’s similarity to antebellum dwellings in Sumter County suggests that Davis or his wife, Agnes Dickey Davis, may have influenced the design. According to family history, Davis began the house in fall 1855 and completed it in 1856. Like many other southwestern Georgia plantation houses, the Davis House was one story, in this instance a large frame box approximately 90 feet wide and 45 feet deep with a hipped roof. A summer dining room and a warming room occupied a raised basement, but most of the foundation consisted of freestanding brick piers, a typical arrangement that helped cool the house in summer.⁵³

The most distinctive and unusual features of the house’s exterior were two identical porticoes, both nearly 15 feet deep, one facing the main road to the south, the other facing north. Their scale immediately signaled the high status of the Davis family. Although the classically proportioned pediments and entablatures suggested a builder experienced in the Greek revival, the execution of the stout columns—cylinders more than 2 feet in diameter made of curved brick covered in stucco—exhibited less finesse. Their simple caps nodded to Doric capitals, while the baseless shafts stood on plinths. Domestic architecture in Georgia rarely featured large brick columns or matching front and rear façades. Given that a simple piazza or work porch could have sufficed for the back of the house, the rear portico indicates a deliberate design choice responding to the desires of the owners or builder, or to the presence of undocumented landscape features. The two porticoes endowed the house with a distinctly formal quality despite its relatively plain finish.⁵⁴

Both porticoes of the Davis House were rain porches (also known as Carolina porches), a distinctively southern architectural feature in which columns or piers on plinths stand independent of the porch posts, floor, and railings. As rain porches, the Davis House porticoes offered occupants deep shade while protecting the porch floor from weather. Builders in southwestern Georgia occasionally constructed rain porches; notably, the English architect John Wind incorporated them into several impressive Greek revival dwellings near Thomasville. Wind likely used rain porches for aesthetic reasons, as they tend to give columned porticoes a more temple-like appearance. Rain porches were a common feature on houses in Sumter County, and the Davises likely requested that their builder use them in Georgia.⁵⁵

While the twin-columned façades of the Davis House invoked classical refinement, the dormitory-like floor plan of its interior accommodated the functional needs of a large White household (Figures 8 and 9). Its cross-hall plan, with a north–south center hall and an east–west transverse hall dividing the structure into quadrants, was unusual in Georgia. The contemporary main house at the Tarver Plantation, still standing in Baker County near Albany, also has such a plan, with 16-foot-wide intersecting hallways and large interior doorways that created a strikingly airy living and entertaining space. In contrast, the builder of the Davis House likely incorporated the transverse hall primarily to provide greater privacy to members of its expansive household. Eight large rooms, each with a fireplace, opened onto either hallway. At each end of the transverse hall a smaller room, roughly 8 feet by 10 feet, likely functioned as a storage or dressing room, or possibly even as sleeping quarters for household slaves or overflow guests. At just under 7 feet wide, both halls served primarily as means of access rather than as living or entertaining spaces. The 1860 census counted fifteen White members of the Davis household: Charles and Agnes; four sons and three daughters, ages five to seventeen; five additional young people ages ten to eighteen, including Charles’s brother, Henry; and a twenty-two-year-old music teacher.⁵⁶

Altogether, the style and form of the Davis House expressed the ambitions, specific needs, and circumscribed options of its owners, who, like their fellow migrants from Sumter County, utilized enslaved laborers to transform their new surroundings quickly into a highly profitable plantation landscape. The few known nearby plantation houses expand this story of rapid change. The Boynton House, a look-alike dwelling that stood 4 miles south of the Davis House site, was probably constructed by the same builder. It further illustrates the transition from frontier to settlement in its massive, awkward lines (Figure 10). Like the Davis House, the Boynton House had a front (west) portico with a pediment, heavy entablature, and four round brick columns on plinths placed in a rain porch configuration. The east side featured a simpler portico with two columns that omitted the crowning entablature. Unlike the cross-hall arrangement of the Davis House, the design of the Boynton House eliminated most halls altogether; instead of a central hall, the builder installed two front doors that opened into different rooms. This unusual and old-fashioned arrangement probably reflected the needs of the house’s owners, just as the plan of the Davis House served that family.⁵⁷ The more sophisticated design of a house built for another member of the Sumter group, Edward J. Plowden, originally 2 miles north of the Davis House, reveals the rapid transformation of southwestern Georgia into a more settled, accessible part of the South. This two-story Greek revival house featured a well-proportioned portico supported by four wooden fluted columns and a conventional four-over-four plan with center halls. By the time of the Civil War, Robert J. McClary, Davis’s stepbrother, had “a fine two story House, containing 8 large rooms, all plastered,” on his 2,625-acre Pachitla Creek plantation. Given its wealth, the Whitney community probably boasted several other dwellings comparable in size and finish to the Plowden and McClary Houses.⁵⁸

A century later, in the winter of 1960–61, SMMA chairman Matthew McWhorter accompanied Kennedy and Garcia to “inspect an ante bellum plantation home,” likely the Davis House. Its peeling paint, sagging shutters, and a fallen column spoke to the now impoverished condition of Calhoun County. Despite the house’s poor condition, the SMMA bought it (prior to finalizing its contract with Stone Mountain Plantation Inc.) and hired Barge and Company, an Atlanta-based general contracting firm, to move it to Stone Mountain.⁵⁹ Barge and Company divided the structure along its cross halls into four sections. A reporter for the Albany Herald who witnessed the dismantling process noted the old-fashioned post-and-beam construction of the house, its columns of curved brick, and its basement dining room with the skeletal remains of a feathered punkah hanging from the ceiling.⁶⁰

During the reassemblage of the Davis House on its new site north of Stone Mountain in 1961–62, Stone Mountain Plantation Inc. transformed a vernacular Greek revival plantation house of the 1850s into a sophisticated Federal-style country seat of the 1810s (Figure 11). By removing all traces of southwest Georgia from the Davis House, Means created a better storyboard for Kennedy and Garcia (Figures 12 and 13). Although he retained the basic shape and fenestration of the house, along with its four chimneys and front and back porticoes, he eliminated its stout cylindrical columns, its heavy entablature, and its rectangular overdoor transoms, as well as the rain porches and the masonry pier foundation. The remodeling lightened and feminized the house’s features, making them more delicate and curving. More slender and tapered brick columns crowned with correct Tuscan capitals now carried the porticoes. A simple cornice replaced the heavy entablature. On the primary façade, Means removed the heavy Greek revival entry and substituted more finely detailed woodwork and a demilune fanlight. He then added double flights of curving steps and iron railings, perhaps inspired by well-known examples such as the stair of Concord at Natchez, Mississippi, or the Gorgas House in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Means also transformed the floor plan of the original house, sweeping away traces of the bustling Davis household to create ample spaces that better suggested gracious living. Means not only widened the front entry hall but also introduced barrel-vaulted hall ceilings and eliminated the back half of the central hall entirely to create a new drawing room (Figures 14, 15, and 16). He also indulged in some chicanery by inserting a bull’s-eye skylight and a grand staircase, both of which opened into a windowless attic.⁶¹ Finally, the reconstructed house now rested on a full masonry ground floor that significantly increased its overall square footage.

These changes created a hierarchy of spaces in terms of scale and interior finishes that the Davis House never possessed, greatly enhancing Kennedy and Garcia’s opportunities to employ an array of decorative schemes. Compared with the eight nearly equal-size, plainly finished rooms of the original house, the expanded square footage, high ceilings, and elegant moldings that Means introduced generated a more cosmopolitan backdrop for an imaginary planter family. Means, with Kennedy and Garcia, established the new drawing room as the largest and most formal room in the house, copying details from the front parlor at the Owens-Thomas House in Savannah, built in the Regency style by an English architect in 1819 (Figures 17 and 18). This new drawing room pulled the building away from its vernacular origins, providing a space to showcase the most sophisticated furniture, works of art, and textiles in the house. Other rooms on the main floor, now identified as the gentlemen’s study, ladies’ parlor, dining room, master bedroom, lady’s bedroom, and guest room, featured wainscoting, cornices, and mantelpieces evoking those of fine dwellings built along the Eastern Seaboard in the 1810s. In contrast, the lower ceilings, brick floors, and basic moldings in the rooms on the ground floor (simple baseboards with no wainscoting or cornices) suggested less formal spaces. Here were the summer dining room and warming kitchen (spaces likely inspired by the two basement rooms in the original Davis House) along with a mother-in-law’s bedroom.

Even as they added square footage and raised the ceilings of the Davis House, Kennedy and Garcia sought to retain the vernacular building’s characteristically human scale. They wanted a plantation attraction that would represent a style of living to which contemporary visitors could aspire, and that would spur them to purchase antique goods to arrange in their own homes. At one point Means proposed a monumental white-columned portico inspired by the John Wind–designed Greenwood mansion near Thomasville, Georgia, but it did not convey the approachable, attainable elegance that Kennedy and Garcia sought to cultivate at the site (Figure 19).

Kennedy claimed the credit for the decorative program of the house, which presented the life of a pedigreed yet practical Georgia planter family. She staged a mixture of furnishings and decorative objects that played the roles of beloved eighteenth-century family heirlooms, functional pieces made by plantation carpenters, and stylish French and English goods selected on a European tour. Although Kennedy and Garcia intended to use the Antebellum Plantation as a venue for Garcia to showcase and sell antiques, his involvement ended before the attraction opened in 1963. It is likely that the Kennedy–Garcia partnership deteriorated with the increased involvement of SMMA chairman McWhorter in the project, culminating in his marriage to Kennedy in October 1962. One Atlanta Constitution article in 1963 credited Kennedy with “almost single-handedly” discovering “the astonishing collection of artifacts that has made the plantation buildings spring into vitality.”⁶² After the breakup with Garcia, Kennedy clearly took charge, investing as much as $100,000 to purchase museum-quality pieces for the main house and outbuildings (although she did consult with another Atlanta antiques dealer and interior designer).⁶³ While she selected French Empire furnishings for the ladies’ parlor, elsewhere she used a mix of European and American pieces. Her array of attractive objects emphasized how the planter’s family spent, rather than made, their money.

Like most plantation house museums of the period, the complex reinforced the sense that plantations were primarily spaces for White leisure and desire, both for the planter family of long ago and for modern-day tourists (Figure 20). The concession had only nebulous ties to cotton production, and it overlooked the violence and tedium of forced labor. The fantasy was instead an almost exclusively domestic one, allowing contemporary White visitors (especially those who lived in the South) the opportunity to link the Black people they employed in their own homes to the unconfrontational enslaved presence at the Antebellum Plantation. Kennedy’s choices for interpreting slavery at the site echoed decades of conventional public history and scholarship, reinforcing myths of happy and loyal slaves.

As at Colonial Williamsburg, an arrangement of outbuildings gave visitors to the Antebellum Plantation the impression of inhabiting a complete material world. Means planned the complex along the lines of an eighteenth-century neo-Palladian villa, likely using well-known Virginia examples such as Mount Vernon and Mount Airy as models. He drew attention to the big house by framing it on either side with one-and-a-half-story supporting buildings, designed as a kitchen and an office, and formal gardens laid out in geometric beds (Figure 21). Means placed the big house on a north–south axis with an overseer’s house and separated the two with a greensward. To the west he set out a court of service buildings. A fanciful two-story carriage house built of historical materials dominated this area. Other buildings—some of which were largely intact historical structures—included a barn, a smokehouse, a storage crib, a well house, and a privy. Tickets to view the complex were sold at a “country store” located at the entrance, which also had souvenir trinkets for sale (Figure 22). Much like the guesthouses and garages that Means designed for his suburban clients, the buildings that made up the court existed only to support the big house and its White residents.⁶⁴

Slavery and African Americans, if marginalized, were nonetheless present at the complex and indeed played an essential role in shaping the historical fantasy marketed by the Antebellum Plantation to the public. As a fairy-tale landscape, the plantation became a White-majority space in which its imagined first family enjoyed a life of leisure supported by a handful of phantom Black retainers. But as with the big house, it was important to Stone Mountain Plantation Inc. to maintain an authentic material connection to slavery. To their credit, Kennedy and Means refrained from building slave housing in the style of the postcard-ready carriage house. Instead, they brought two slave houses to the site from Mount Pleasant plantation near Covington, Georgia (Figure 23). These were small utilitarian dwellings, each with a single door and window. With their frame construction, wooden floors, stone chimneys, and abundant housewares, they were more comfortable than most Georgia slave houses, but still they presented a fairly unembellished interpretation of slave life. However, the inclusion of only two dwellings rather than a full street of such houses reduced the imagined enslaved population of the plantation to a small number of people, flipping the historical racial demographics of the southern plantation and reinforcing the general impression of the site as exclusively for the enjoyment of its majority-White population.⁶⁵

For all that Kennedy valued human scale and authentic building materials and decorative arts, she also wished her concession to provide visitors with the ultimate southern fantasy by enabling them to step into a come-to-life version of Gone with the Wind. The transformation of the Davis House into a showplace with vaulted ceilings, fine furnishings, and curving steps did much of that work, and when the complex opened in 1963, Kennedy exclaimed to a reporter, “Can’t you just see Miss Scarlett swinging down those stairs?”⁶⁶ A few months later, however, she was clearly concerned that the world she had created was too lifeless. To add human interest, she hired Butterfly McQueen, who had played the role of the flighty enslaved housemaid Prissy in the film version of Gone with the Wind, to appear at the site (Figure 24). This final touch explicitly connected the film to Kennedy’s exhibit. By choosing to employ a Black actress who had performed a familiar enslaved character in the film, Kennedy enriched White female visitors’ ability to imagine themselves as Scarlett O’Hara.

McQueen probably appeared at Stone Mountain as herself. However, a sign announcing “ ‘Prissy’ Is Here Today” hung on the plantation’s gate on days she was on-site, and White visitors likely did not distinguish between McQueen and the stereotyped caricature she portrayed in the film.⁶⁷ Her employment at Stone Mountain originated with a suggestion from Charles A. Green Jr. of Augusta, who had hired McQueen to appear in costume as Prissy at holiday parties. The suggestion appealed to Kennedy’s “sense of drama.”⁶⁸ McQueen worked at the plantation until July 1965, and then subsequently sued Stone Mountain Plantation Inc. for the unauthorized use of her image in advertising.⁶⁹

In bringing together authentic and fictional representations of slavery—the unadorned slave houses acquired from Mount Pleasant coupled with McQueen’s evocation of Prissy—Kennedy probably felt she exhibited appropriate attentiveness to the site’s dual role of educating and entertaining. Contemporaries noted the stark contrast between the spartan character of the slave dwellings and the luxury of the big house; Atlanta Constitution writer Doris Lockerman described “the assured, gracious opulence of the planters’ civilization, side by side with the grainy, bare-bone confrontation of slavery.”⁷⁰ The 1964 souvenir book for Stone Mountain Park, which included an illustrated guide to the plantation that Kennedy likely produced or at least approved, frankly referred to “the evil practice of buying and selling human beings.” Yet, unsurprisingly, it immediately equivocated by noting that “Georgia plantation owners as a rule were good to their slaves.”⁷¹ For the plantation fantasy to work—and lest her antiques come across as ill-gotten gains—Kennedy had to assure readers and visitors that the enslavers at this plantation were not abusers. The presence of Prissy, apparently uninjured by her enslavement, downplayed the consequences of an “evil” system. Overall, Kennedy hit upon a familiar New South rationalization: however bad slavery may have been, slaveholders were not responsible for it, and in fact they did their best to mitigate its effects on “their people.”

Regardless of how much (or how little) thought Kennedy and Means gave to the unfinished Confederate memorial nearby, observers recognized the connection between the Antebellum Plantation and the Lost Cause. Reporting on the concession—then known as Stone Acres—immediately before its launch in April 1963, the Atlanta Constitution’s Lockerman summed up the major takeaways: “A way dear enough to fight and die for, a time of silken and homespun textures, a memory of refined grace and simplicities, the mutual interest in survival that bound them all together—all these will be sensed in Stone Acres, the plantation complex to be opened soon as part of the Stone Mountain Memorial.”⁷² Despite the fact that Stone Acres was not the Tara replica once imagined by the SMMA, the plantation and the relief sculpture ultimately finished on the mountain told the same tale as Gone with the Wind’s sweeping cinematic prologue: “There was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields called the Old South. Here, in this pretty world, gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of knights and their ladies fair, of master and of slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a civilization gone with the wind.”

Although the plantation at Stone Mountain was “a dream remembered,” it failed to lure enough visitors to become a profitable venture. From 1961 to 1966, Kennedy spent approximately $161,000 of her own funds on the concession, much of that to decorate the buildings (by one 1966 estimate, the value of the furnishings was $94,000). Meanwhile, the state of Georgia paid more than $547,000 (equivalent to approximately $4.5 million in 2021) to relocate, restore, and create the setting for the buildings.⁷³ An audit undertaken in 1966 showed that Kennedy “lost money every year since she opened the Plantation.” Specifically, the Antebellum Plantation suffered annual operational losses of nearly $40,000 between its opening in April 1963 and January 1967. In addition to paying thousands in rent to the state, Kennedy doled out thousands more on advertising, utilities, taxes, salaries, and other business expenses. Despite her efforts, the concession proved less popular than other park attractions—which by the mid-1960s included a skyride, a scenic railroad, a game ranch, an antique car museum, and a riding academy. A 1967 feasibility study revealed that only 2 percent of park guests visited the plantation that year. A second report singled out the plantation as the least successful park concession, a failure it blamed on a lack of interpretation, asserting that “the Plantation is merely a showplace.”⁷⁴ Overwhelmed with management and expenses, Kennedy had no time to train guides to describe the antiques in which she had made such a great investment, and visitors undoubtedly preferred the more immediate pleasures of other park attractions to the relocated buildings of the Antebellum Plantation.⁷⁵

In the end, Kennedy’s dream of creating a Williamsburg-caliber attraction became a personal nightmare. For the onetime small-town girl, the Antebellum Plantation offered a way to demonstrate the erudition she had accumulated during her career in politics and as a society matron. She enjoyed the process of selecting the buildings and purchasing and arranging the pieces that filled them. Showing off the antiques in the plantation house to reporters before the opening in 1963, Kennedy proudly declared, “We think they are right.”⁷⁶ But the actual operation of the site proved less appealing to her, and commercial success was elusive. Estranged from her business partner Garcia, she relied on her new husband, SMMA chairman McWhorter. But this marriage between a state official and a state lessee generated a scandal that ultimately led McWhorter to resign from the SMMA in May 1963. Kennedy finally sold Stone Mountain Plantation Inc. in 1968 to Dee C. Land, operator of the Stone Mountain skyride.⁷⁷

Kennedy “painstakingly gathered together thousands of items of beautiful antique cabinetry, linens, carpets, silver, damask, porcelain,” and other objects to create a plantation complex that fulfilled her own fantasies and would, she believed, resonate with those of an eager public.⁷⁸ By the same token, the Antebellum Plantation’s mixture of authenticity and fiction also served the Lost Cause ideology driving the development of Stone Mountain Park. Ironically, the absence of large white columns made the plantation more believable: the human scale of the complex and the thousands of objects, both “silken and homespun,” helped this invented setting appear surprisingly real. That seeming authenticity coincided with the well-worn tropes of Lost Cause storytelling, marginalizing the history of slavery and the enslaved while depicting White consumption as virtuous and White pleasure as paramount. The plantation, past and present, was an amusement park.

The Antebellum Plantation endures and remains strikingly unaltered. The only major addition to the complex has been the Thornton House, which the High Museum of Art gave to Stone Mountain Park in 1967. From 1997 until the summer of 2021, the state leased the site to Herschend Family Entertainment, which operates other history-themed parks, including Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri. Recent announcements about significant changes to the management and interpretation of Stone Mountain State Park have not specifically addressed the plantation’s future.⁷⁹

As the public calls for changes to Stone Mountain Park and its Confederate monument, a reinterpretation of the Antebellum Plantation is critically important. Although the attraction’s history is inseparable from that of the park, reducing the Antebellum Plantation to a mere supporting player to the monument would miss significant differences between the two. The state, acting through the SMMA, finished the monument as part of its campaign of defiance against federally mandated integration, but it relinquished control over the design and operation of the plantation to private concessionaires driven by personal, professional, and commercial ambitions. Kennedy and her associates focused on creating a fantasy world of architecture and interiors, assuming that the plantation would reinforce the monument’s ideology. Rather than concentrating on a specific narrative, they relied on their prospective audience to animate the carefully arranged buildings and interiors with their imagined mythologies of the Old South. Kennedy’s vision for the plantation could have led to many different outcomes. The easiest and most profitable option likely would have been to build a white-columned Tara. Yet what was ultimately produced was far more complex than a straightforward replica or the static monument now etched in the mountain. The Antebellum Plantation offers a distinctive and intact case study of a fabricated “historic” site deserving of consideration equal to that given to the Stone Mountain carving itself.

Recent responses to the Antebellum Plantation, emphasizing its associations with the 1860s, have failed to acknowledge the complex’s potential as a historic site of the 1960s. In the 2010s, then-operator Herschend Family Entertainment renamed the site Historic Square to disguise it as a village of historical buildings. But Kennedy, Garcia, and Means were too successful for that to work: visitors can easily recognize the site as a plantation, and the newly civic sheen failed to distract potential critics. In 2018, the DeKalb County chapter of the NAACP called for further erasure by asking the park to remove from the complex any “references to a plantation.”⁸⁰ Yet denying that the site is an antebellum plantation concession within a Confederate theme park robs the complex of its truest historical and cultural value.

Unlike the enormous relief sculpture on Stone Mountain, the Antebellum Plantation’s buildings and interiors can be reinterpreted relatively easily. The site provides an exceptional opportunity for visitors to question how their own experiences, education, consumption, and assumptions also perpetuate the Old South myth. As Americans increasingly demand truth telling at heritage tourist destinations, the Antebellum Plantation can encourage visitors to recognize that the seemingly “authentic” past may indeed be a fabrication.