Saving the Farm
Excerpt from Elizabeth Arndt's manuscript, "Conversations with History" Chapter Two: Saved the Farm.
Saving the Farm
Saving the Farm
The Fawcett Era 1937-1993
McDonald (Don) and Susannah (Susie) Fawcett working on the garret ca. 1979. Courtesy of Susie Fawcett.
The Fawcetts had owned the farm for fourteen years and raised their two young children, McDonald and Sarah, there. The farm had been given to them in 1979 by Don’s grandmother, Georgia F. Fawcett, who had purchased it in 1937 and restored the old farmhouse. She is still acknowledged by many to have been one of Savannah’s early preservationists. Take, for example, a 1998 letter to the editor in the Savannah Morning News by Robert Henderson who included Georgia Fawcett among the pioneers of the preservation movement along with Stella Henderson, Lillian Bragg and others. These individuals began to restore historic homes long before Savannah’s preservation movement really got underway. Not until the early 50s were the first of Savannah’s notable historic buildings restored and opened as house museums.
Historic preservation in Savannah is usually seen as a 1950s and 60s phenomenon, heavily invested in what is now the Historic District and adjoining areas. Certainly, during this time, there was a dramatic increase in public awareness of the value of restoring historic buildings, especially in the older city neighborhoods.
Only a few years after Georgia Fawcett bought the farm, Rosa Monroe Haymans, of the newly formed Azalea Garden Club, suggested restoring Bethel Cemetery as the club’s annual project. It was the cemetery and its church, located a quarter mile from the farm that gave the area its name of “Bethel Community”. The Club set out to involve others in the community and, over the next year, many families, mostly those that used the cemetery, donated both time and money. Volunteers worked at clearing away what was described as a “wilderness” of overgrown thickets and planted new shrubs and grass. The Monroe family paid for a new “cyclone” or chain link fence around the newly refurbished ground, and the County improved its access road. The need to maintain all this led to the formation of the Bethel Cemetery Association in 1940, and title to the cemetery property was given to the Association in that year by Robert Lee and Carrie Gould, who owned the land.
Needless to say, the Azalea Garden Club won first prize for “Rural Cemetery Work” in 1939 at the State Garden Club Convention. A dozen large old azaleas, four camellias and one lone arborvitae in the old section of the cemetery seem to be all that remains of the beautification project. It is likely that the Garden Club volunteers filled in grave depressions when they grassed the area, and much of the space between tombstones probably holds unmarked burials. Fifteen years later, the Club renewed its interest in the community with yet another project, installing landscaping at the newly constructed Bethel Church, which replaced a Civil War era building which had burned down in 1941. Again, the Azalea Garden Club won first prize for their work in 1955. The Bethel Cemetery Association still maintains the cemetery and meets annually in the fall.
Meanwhile, back in Savannah the historic preservation movement really gathered momentum, and the 1950s and 60s saw a tremendous amount of activity. Federal funds became widely available in 1965 for the restoration of historic properties, which provided a great incentive in Savannah, as it did elsewhere in the nation. In 1966 the oldest section of the city was officially designated a National Historic Landmark District, and a year later an inventory of all historic buildings in the area, the Historic Savannah Survey was published. Some years later in 1973 the Historic Zoning Ordinance was passed, which completed the early phase of the historic preservation period. In this crucial twenty plus years, there were many noteworthy individuals and projects besides those mentioned above, and as might be expected, preservation efforts in rural settings are even less known, like those of Rosa Monroe Haymans, Georgia Fawcett, and the Gould family in Bethel Community.
Mrs. Georgia Fawcett pictured left of the fireplace in the living room of the Jacob Fox Gould house with friends. She named the farm "Half Moon Orchard" or "Half Moon Farm", ca. 1950. Courtesy of George Fawcett Jr.
Fortunately, Mrs. Fawcett’s restoration of the old farmhouse was well known to relatives, friends and neighbors. In 1994 Susie Fawcett described to us in some detail the work that Mrs. Fawcett had done. First, she had the deteriorating brick foundations and chimneys rebuilt and a small chimney added to vent the iron stove in the dining room. She reproduced the gable-end chimneys to copy the original ones using the same brick pattern. She also had several missing windows replaced with carefully reproduced copies of the unusual 15 pane originals. [Note: According to later architectural analysis, there are 14 original 6 over 9 windows preserved. Windows reproduced and several added to match the existing sashes include three 6 over 6 and five 2 over 2.]
After that, she did some major new construction by adding an eight foot extension to the rear of the building. This created enough space for an interior bathroom next to the bedroom. The rest of the extension became a porch, which she enclosed later to create a small kitchen. Later, the extension was carried across the remaining eight feet or so, to include the entire width of the house. This space became an entry or mud room with a concrete floor.
Don and Susie Fawcett had some remarkable pictures of this work-in-progress which they were kind enough to let us copy. The oldest photographs show the house in the 40s in a derelict state, with empty windows, unpainted clapboards, old hand pump at the back, and overgrown vines and shrubs at the front porch. It looks so dilapidated it is no stretch of the imagination to think that it was once used as a goat barn. Susie said that Mrs. Fawcett claimed the first time she drove up to the house, there was a goat standing in the front doorway. A neighbor said something similar, “You know, Georgia told me that when she first drove up, she saw that goat stickin’ its head out the window.” Several photographs have “Half Moon Orchard” or “Half Moon Farm” written on the back, and it would seem that these were the names that Mrs. Fawcett used for the farm.
Mrs. Fawcett’s name for the farm, “Half Moon Orchard” has an interesting story. Half Moon refers to the retention basin and dam of the old Savannah-Ogeechee Canal, which is located about one mile north of the farm. Neighbors say that there was a fishing camp for years on the eastern side of the pond, and after the fishing camp closed, it was a place where teen boys used to go and camp out and fish. The orchard is on our property, just to the right of the farmhouse. Today, there are only three pear trees, but they produce dozens of “hard pears” or cooking pears every summer. These pears, I can tell you, have a wonderful flavor and freeze well.
Old variety pears and crabapple trees are what remains of the farm orchard.
Documentating the Farmhouse - Pre-1945
Picture of the front of the farmhouse taken in 1944, just before it was restored and remodeled.
This view of the south side shows the chimney in need of repair, and two of the three windows with old fashioned board shutters. Barely visible against the unpainted clapboards is a door next to the chimney. You can see one lone sunflower, which seems to be a survivor of a long abandoned garden.
There is no sign of the old kitchen building that once existed. According to memoirs written by descendants of the original owners, it was located about 50 feet from the south side of the house. The door next to the chimney allowed the housewife easy access from the master bedroom, so she could start cooking in the wee hours of the morning without waking anyone. After a second, larger kitchen was built, the old kitchen was used as a “sugar house” and “smoke house”. Both kitchens were built some distance away from the house because of the danger of fire.
The photographs of the north side and rear of the farmhouse shows an even more dilapidated part of the building. Here the clapboards have actually fallen off, exposing the brick nogging in a few places. The boarded up space around the back door is enclosing the original open central porch. By the late 1800s there was a breezeway that connected the house to a kitchen addition. As it appears in the memoirs, the new kitchen built was a combination kitchen and dining room with a large fireplace.
Just to the left of the small platform, which seems to be the remnant of the breezeway, there is an old hand pump. Farther left is a large whetstone for sharpening tools. At some point Susie Fawcett mentioned that the building was a toolshed as well as goat barn and pointed out the nails—dozens of them—on the living room walls that once held shovels, rakes, axes, etc. She said that she and Don were able to pull some of them out, but others were too deeply embedded in the tough “heart pine”. Of course the heart pine preserved the building from termites, mildew and any number of organisms that attack wood.
Documenting the Farmhouse - After 1945
Two photographs taken just a year later show an amazing transformation. One of them has a notation “Half Moon Farm Nov. 1945”. The picture of the front of the farmhouse shows two rebuilt chimneys and front steps of new red brick. All the weathered clapboards sport a bright new coat of white paint, with the window frames painted a dark color by contrast. An old fashioned white church pew and some wicker furniture sit on the front porch. Most of the overgrown shrubs seen in the 1944 picture are gone, having been replaced by much smaller plants and a grassed lawn.
The second 1945 photo, the one that is actually labeled “Half Moon Farm Nov. 1945”, is of the rear of the house and shows two-thirds of the addition, just the bedroom and a small porch, all freshly painted white. On the steps of the porch is a dark shadow with a white dot, which if enlarged, shows a fairly good sized brown dog with what looks like a slice of bread in its mouth. No one that I showed the picture to could tell me the dog’s name or who he belonged to. Unfortunately, there were no “before and after” pictures of the interior of the farmhouse.
The twelve foot deep addition with the bedroom and porch was significant, but there was much more to come… Eventually, the porch, where the dog is sitting, was remodeled into a small galley-style kitchen, and another room, now called the “mud room” was built on to the left to complete the addition. This room, unlike the other two has a cement floor and a continuous brick foundation.
All three components reflected styles still in vogue in the 1940s, such as paired windows and exposed rafter ends (also known as “sticks”) at the roofline. A new chimney, seen on the left, was also built at this time to vent a small wood burning stove that Mrs. Fawcett used for cooking.
The full addition completed and the addition of two dormers on the west side ca. 1980.