Al Olson couldn’t find his house anywhere. He and his wife, Lynda Sanford, leafed through sheet after sheet of contour maps and surveys showing the location of Buckhead homes and streets and creeks, but could never find their place marked on any of them.
It was very frustrating. They’d lived in the white house on Wieuca Road for about three years and they had many questions about it.
“We’d just like to learn more about the house,” Sanford said. “What do we know? Not a lot. As we clean it up, we find more and more interesting things. When you go into the garage, there are windows there. Who would put windows in the garage?”
And there are doors in places that make Sanford believe the house now looks nothing like it did when was built. She thinks it was added to, expanded, reconfigured, so that rooms now have different uses then they did back in the 1930s, when work began on the place.
That’s why the two were pouring over dozens of maps and surveys the Buckhead Heritage Society put on display in a back room of the Blue Heron Nature Center one recent sunny Sunday afternoon. They wanted to find their place in Buckhead’s history.
It was not to be. Some of the maps and surveys proved too old. Others displayed too small an area – when the couple looked closely, the spot where their house should be was located just past the border of the map. “We’d be right here,” Olson said, pointing to a blank patch of white a half-inch outside the border of one survey.
But other members of the crowd that gathered at the Nature Center did find their places among the papers. Marc Nicholson pointed to a small square on a decades-old survey showing streets in the area surrounding what is now the nature center itself. “This is our house right here,” he said.
In 1969, his parents bought seven acres on Emma Lane, he said. He’s 56 now, but remembers those years growing up in Buckhead as being “cool as beans.”
Others brought memories from even deeper in Buckhead’s past.
Lucia Pulgram, who’s 86 and grew up on Peachtree Battle, recalled when men with mules dug the basements for other houses on the street and she heard the noises bootleggers made racing deliveries across the old river bridge from Cobb County. She remembered the coal-and-ice house and Bill’s Fruit Stand and getting chocolate-covered peppermints from the Candy Kitchen. “I loved those candies,” she said. “If you got a pink one, you’d get one free.”
Memories like hers were part of the reason this event was planned. Buckhead Heritage is trying to build a collection of oral histories of the community. This event, held Oct. 30 at the same time that the North Buckhead Civic Association was holding its Fall Fling, was the first time the group had worked with a homeowner’s group to try to unearth oral histories. They hoped they would meet some long-time residents and be able to record them. By the end of the day, Lucia Pulgram and her husband Bill were among five residents whose reminiscences were recorded, Buckhead Heritage executive director Erica Danylchak said.
They were so pleased with the results that they plan to try to again with other neighborhood groups. “We want to raise awareness of the history,” Danylchak said. “We want to raise awareness of the preservation ethic. By getting people excited and invigorated, that’s the best way. I’m excited to see people excited about it.”
Know some interesting people or places in your community? Email Joe Earle at joeearle@reporternewspapers.net.