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I’m proud to have known PTC’s founding father Regarding the article by Steve Brown, The Citizen, May 13, I must take issue with his premise. Brown, a parvenu if there ever was one, has evidently decided that living in a community means being divisive and questioning well-established historical facts. As a native of the area, one would think Brown would not want to do this. I have been privileged to live in Fayette County for all but seven years of Peachtree City’s history. I have been writing about its conception, its good times and bad, and have come to know personally most of those men who were involved. Its history begins in 1956 when two real estate men in College Park, Earl Denny and Golden Pickett, began searching for large tracts of raw land. They decided that the western side of Fayette County would be a good place to look. It was near an international airport, there were two major highways intersecting there, and a railroad track ran all the way through the area. They proceeded to browse the area, known then as Shakerag and Clover, and stopped in the bank in Tyrone. Bank manager Floy Farr listened politely as they outlined their desire to acquire several thousand acres to create a new town. Farr sent them south on Ga. Highway 74 to talk to “Mr. Bob” Huddleston, who owned as much as 7,000 acres. Denny, the more aggressive of the two, talked a big talk. Mr. Bob listened politely and agreed to take an option on selling some land at $30 an acre. Things were looking up for the real estate developers and Denny contacted Pete Knox Jr. in Augusta, who was a large land and timber holder. Knox and his brother, Wyck, who also had an office in Atlanta, were in the business of building prefab houses and were interested in a place to create a village using this newfangled type of housing. An article in The Fayette County News, Oct. 3, 1956, related the news that a new development was planned for western Fayette County. A Fayette County businessperson, J.B. Masters, told me just last week that he remembers Denney coming into a barber shop in Fayetteville extolling the virtues of investing in a brand new town to be built on the western side of the county. Masters said he smiled politely and graciously declined to take part in this wild idea. An article in The Atlanta Journal, May 13, 1957, caught the eye of a Georgia Tech junior, Joel Cowan. He was the roommate of a Tech senior, Pete Knox III. Cowan thought this “new town” sounded like a project he wanted to be associated with and the father of his roommate was mentioned as a part of the project. His roommate arranged a luncheon with Dad and Cowan. Cowan was asked to manage the new town without salary during his senior year, and was promised stock at the end of the year. He agreed. His duties were to “manage the Fayette County land, collect rent for leased farms, keep the creditor farmers happy so they wouldn’t foreclose (no, they hadn’t been paid yet), fight forest fires and help to plan the community,” which he did. Yes, that included driving down from Atlanta to fight the occasional fire. There were not, however, specific plans as to the layout of the new city, until a corporation was formed in 1957, The Peachtree Corporation of Georgia. Knox Jr. served as a director and Cowan was manager. Also on board, was Willard C. Byrd and Associates, who were landscape architects and planning consultants. The term “city planner” hadn’t been invented yet. Working for this firm at the time was Walter Hunziker, who was also attending Georgia Tech. Hunziker proffered the idea of a planned town such as were being built in England. He and Byrd probably created the color landscapes that appear in the 1957 prospectus. For several years newspaper articles referred to the new community as “New Town.” It is felt that Byrd is the one who finally came up with the name “Peachtree City.” Evidently Hunziker had been contacted somewhat recently by former Mayor Brown. He now lives in Cannes, France, and Brown asked for his remembrances. Bless his heart, due to the fact that it had been at least 54 or 55 years since he even thought about the matter, and the brochure he sent was not correct, some misconceptions have occurred. In an email to Joel Cowan, Dec. 8, 2008, Hunziker wrote, “I had lost most contacts [in Atlanta] until the Internet came up, and on Google I found out that Peachtree City had become real, and that you were its first mayor. Congratulations!” Obviously Hunziker was not aware his short connection to the matter in 1957 was brought to fruition. By the fall of 1958 it became understandable that the project was going to require mega-dollars, more than Knox had to invest. No matter how much Denny tried to convince Fayette Countians the new city was a deal, folks just smiled and graciously said no thanks. Just a few weeks before the 25th city anniversary, I traveled to Augusta and spent an afternoon with Pete Knox Jr. He was most pleasant and courteous. Though he acquired options on thousands of acres of land, he could go no further. Many of the land descriptions were old, i.e., 100 feet to the oak tree and over to the pea patch. He told Cowan that he was turning the project over to him, leaving Cowan to find the financing to continue. As much as Knox was excited about a new town idea, he had never been to the site more than twice, and one of those was just after 1959 when Cowan invited him to spend the night. Knox can be credited, however, with hiring Cowan. Now, one thing I have noticed in my 43 years around Cowan: he was and always will be a visionary. He took the project on, found the financing, drew up a concrete plan, this goes here, that goes there, straightened out the fuzzy-worded deeds, applied to the legislature to create a new city, and had a house built in 30 days to comply with the rules for creating a new city. Those rules included the city had to have a mayor, and the mayor had to live in the city. No problem. Because those 1957 drawings were rather nebulous and drawn without even seeing the property, Cowan had to be definitive. He drew up a plan and he stuck to his plan. He made his plan work. The dictionary describes the word, “father,” figuratively, as “a man who did important work and was a worker or leader.” When Cowan, myself and many others in the 1950s and ’60s came to Fayette County, we looked around to see where we could volunteer, and where we could help to make things better. Decades later, many of us are now in our 70s, but still are volunteering and contributing to our community. We do nothing that is divisive. It is with pride that I say that I have known and worked with the “Father of Peachtree City,” Joel Cowan, for over four of those decades. [Carolyn Cary is the official historian of Fayette County and a contributing writer to The Citizen. Her email is ccary@TheCitizen.com.] login to post comments | Carolyn Cary's blog
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