Inman festival celebrates area's agrarian heritage

By PAT NEWMAN
Staff Writer

Round up a bunch of antique tractor buffs, add a log cabin and grist mill, a sampling of crafts and plenty of food and you've got Inman Farm Heritage Days, opening Friday in the Fayette County community of Inman, just five miles south of Fayetteville.

This is the third annual three-day festival of farm machinery and farm operations like wheat threshing, gristmill operation and black-smithing. Last year's event drew about 10,000 visitors and exhibitors from as far away as New York. Organizers expect more than 200 exhibitors to show off their tractors this year.

Heritage Days opens at 9 a.m. Friday and Saturday and closes at dark. Tractor parade times are noon and 5 p.m. both days. Sunday's opening will be 1 p.m. Admission and parking are free.

The festival is sponsored by Inman United Methodist Church, the West Georgia Two-Cylinder Club and the North Georgia Two-Cylinder Club. Activities are on the grounds of the Minter family farm on Hills Bridge Road, just off Ga. Highway 92.

This year, an authentic 1870s log cabin, dismantled at its original site on New Hope Circle in North Fayette County in December 1998 and rebuilt at the Minter farm, will be open to visitors. Jesse Thornton of Union City, who is related to Felissa Stanley — the man who originally built the one-room cabin — has spent countless hours helping to restore it.

The structure is held together with hickory pegs, which Thornton has meticulously shaved. Poplar logs have been cut to replace those that have rotted away. A shiny metal roof tops the cabin, which originally had wooden shingles. Inside, the original stone fireplace was reconstructed next to the small “granny window” where the family matriarch could peek outside while staying warm beside the fire.

Wave Dennison, a Fayetteville artist and craftswoman, will demonstrate how to make corn shuck dolls inside the cabin. Quilters will be stitching nearby.

Across the field, Buddy Rhoades of Fayetteville will display a 1941 model I-4 International tractor, the one his uncle used to cut the undergrowth around his home in Switzerland, Fla. in the 1950s. Rhoades recalled the day when he was just 3 years old and he wedged his hand in a front-opening on the bright red machine.

He also remembers when the tractor slipped out of gear and ran over his uncle, OK Donahoo. “It broke his rib... liked to killed him,” Rhoades said. The tractor was resurrected from Donahoo's farm last year and brought to Fayette County, where Rhoades and his buddies restored it to its shiny red glory.

It will join similar models in the tractor parade and games this weekend.

For information phone 770-461-2840.

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