Barnesville, Georgia

 

I’ve stopped by eleven Carnegies so far in Georgia on this trip and I had yet to gain entry to one until Barnesville, thanks to the great warmth of the couple who have made it their home for the past thirty years. They feel privileged to live in such a historic and majestic building and are happy to share it with others.

Cara, an artist and poet, makes it her studio as well, with large-paneled murals of lush vegetation on display, reflecting the garden where I found her tending to her flowers.  They consider the building a community asset and try to have gatherings there as often as possible, whether to share art or have readings or philosophical discussions. 

The interior was as magnificent as the exterior, with columns and wooden floor and in-set book cases and wooden staircase to the second floor.  The extensive garden extending a hundred feet in front of the house adds to its luster.  It has been featured in Southern Living Magazine and Georgia Journal and PBS.  Cara’s dazzling work can be seen at carastudios.com.

They were fascinated by my quest and were happy to learn I’ve come upon a few others Carnegies that are lived in.  They’d very much like to connect with other such lucky souls and hear what their experience has been living in a building with such a vibrant and rich past, having been the center of a community for decades and reverberating with the fondest of memories of thousands who have grown up with it.

There might be another Georgia Carnegie available for habitation as the one in Dublin, seventy-five miles to the east, is empty, despite being in the center of the town in a plaza featuring a towering statue of a Confederate soldier and a movie theater. 

There has been a minimum of such monuments.  It’s not like France where nearly every town, regardless of size, has a similar such monument acknowledging those who fought in the First World War.  This one in Dublin was “In memorium of our heroes 1861-1865.”  And it added, “Your sons and daughters will forever guard the memory of your brave deeds.”

Dublin isn’t the only one of the twenty-three cities in Georgia with a Carnegie Library to have adopted the name of a great European city.  There are also Carnegies in the Georgia cities of Rome and Athens.  And there is also one in Macon, the namesake of a city in France that is an occasional Ville Étape during The Tour de France and that I know well. 

When I passed through Macon in Georgia for its Carnegie on the campus of Mercer University, I had to be mindful of my pronunciation avoiding the French soft “a” and turning the “c” into an “s.”  In Georgia it is “Macon as in bacon,“ rather than “Ma-sone” as in “bone,” as I’ve become accustomed to pronouncing it from my time in France.  The library is now Hartman Hall and houses the Fine Art Department, though library is still engraved on the top of the building mostly hidden by the trees. 

My route from Macon to Barnesville took me through a small town with a tiny post office open all hours for residents to access their postal boxes as it had someone on duty just a few hours a week.  It was a perfect oasis for me with a water spigot on its backside and an electric outlet inside. It was even air-conditioned.

I’ve been successful in coming upon a service station/convenience store most every evening within an hour of my ending my ride so I could fill my two insulated water bottles with ice and have the great luxury of cold/cold drinking in my tent.  Last night as I was waiting behind a guy to pay for my fifty cent large cup of ice, the gentleman said to the cashier, “I’ll get his ice too.”  Such gestures always make my day.