Not bad. She had parlayed a single dime into a lot of money. Martha Berry wasn’t through. She deposited the earnings in the bank, wrote out a check, and sent it to Henry Ford. She wrote in a letter: “Sir, here is your fifteen hundred dollar dividend for your dime investment in Berry College.”
Henry Ford and his wife took the next train to Georgia, driving from Atlanta up a long, tedious, and narrow road that cut through the high country to Berry College. He left all traces of civilization far behind, finding himself trapped back in a world that bore only the footprints of the poor, hungry, and uneducated. The land’s beauty was steeped with a feeling of lonesome isolation.
The girls prepared a luncheon for the Fords and sang:
“We want a nice new recitation hall
with desks by the score
and a dormitory large enough
for a hundred girls or more.”
Henry Ford loved folk dancing, and the song had a catchy little tune. It was one he could remember. He liked it. Ford was wearing a broad smile when he turned to his wife and said, ‘Listen, Callie, the girls are singing that they want a recreation hall. Let’s give them one.”
“No, Henry,” his wife whispered. “They’re singing that they want a recitation hall.”
Ford shrugged. “That’s all right, Callie,” he said. “Let’s give them both.”
When Henry Ford drove away, he left behind three million dollars.
Martha Berry did not spend it on peanuts this time.
She watched a dormitory and a dining room, both sculptured in old English Gothic style, rise above the campus.
She smiled and took a deep breath.
Berry College would make it now, she thought.
For the first time, she knew her hopes and dreams had been given a solid foundation.
Hers had been a dime well spent.
She turned and walked out into the gardens and rolled up her sleeves.
No time to waste, she decided.
No time to tarry.
There were seeds to be sown. Here and yonder. Mostly yonder.
Miracles were grown from seeds.
In later years, when she was presented to the Court of St. James, in Great Britain, Martha Berry defied tradition, then broke it. She refused to wear a veil. No. She refused to buy a veil.
“That’s enough money to educate another couple of children,” she said. She would not waste it on lace.
Martha Berry felt honored, and she was as gracious as always.
The high and the mighty all crowded all around her.
She shook hands with dukes and earls and emissaries sent straight from the throne, but, in her heart, she knew she did not need the Court of St. James.
Not really.
Martha Berry, the lady of the mountains, would have been royalty in ragged overalls.
A Three Pickup Place
Somewhere on the outskirts of
Helen, Georgia
Pop: 420
The Scene: For a time, it did not seem as though Helen stood a ghost of a chance. The Indian mound builders came in 10,000 B. C., but they didn’t stay forever. A logging camp died away when the great virgin forest was all harvested from the slopes. Traces of gold dust almost created a genuine boom town. But, alas, richer deposits of the ore were found elsewhere, so the few ramshackle buildings became something of a ghost town, always a ghost town. Helen could have faded away, but its people were too stubborn to let the little town go.
The Sights: Helen has become a picturesque little Alpine village, simply located in the Nacoochee Valley instead of the Alps. The town has been transformed from a drab little hamlet into an architectural glimpse of Bavaria, a storybook village of gables, rococo towers, gingerbread balconies, and scalloped fascia boards. A vacant lot was even converted into a charming cobblestone alley, lined with almost two hundred Old World shops that offer imports from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. German restaurants dish up meals of schnitzel, sauerbraten, roulade, or wurst, and good wines come from Helen’s own Habersham Winery.
The Setting: Window boxes are everywhere, planted during summer with petunias, dahlias, and geraniums. Bells atop the White Horse Plaza fill the downtown with the sounds of music, echoing out toward the blue, misty crest of mountains that hide the Appalachian Trail, out where graceful fairways of a world class golf resort scissor their way through the valleys. The high country has become a gathering place for outdoor adventures, such as river tubing, horseback riding, canoeing, fishing, mountain biking, and hiking back into isolated hollows where stunning waterfalls pour from the rock cliffs. In fact, those who changed the face of Helen long believed that the morning veil of mist rising out of the valley and hovering above the Chattahoochee River would be a perfect backdrop for an Alpine village. They were right.
The Story: He came down from the timberlands when the morning was young, and the sun was still trying to climb the far side of the mountains. He was wise beyond his years, and his age had left a rawhide face etched with wrinkles. His hair, visible around the edges of a gimme cap, was white, and he walked with a slight shuffle. He was there at the Country Café every morning. Coffee. Black. Thick. In a mug, never a cup.
He sometimes brought his own. His eggs had more yellow than white, and his bacon had only been singed on one side. He sat at a back table, as he always did, and described once and for all, forever erasing all doubts, the differences between a cafe and a restaurant.
“Cafes ain’t got no tablecloths,” he said. “Cafes got pickup trucks out front.”
“How can you tell a good place to eat from a bad one?” I asked.
“By the number of pickup trucks out front,” he answered.
The older gentleman scratched his whiskered chin, then said, “If a place has got only one pickup truck out front, you know the food’s not any good. And if it has twelve or fifteen pickup trucks out front, you know you’re not gonna find nothing inside but a lot of loud talking, loud jukebox music, and hard drinking.”
He grinned. He shrugged.
He concluded, “Personally, I prefer a three pickup place.”
In a three pickup place, which is obviously too large for a one-horse town, you can always bet on finding a chief magistrate, who doubles as fry cook, distiller and dispenser of hot coffee, bottle washer, and semi-professional arbitrator,
