Other Voices, Other Towns: The Traveler's Story. Caleb Pirtle III
Berry asked.
“Yes, ma’ am.”
“Then you’ll learn.”
She did, and, in time, she became Martha Berry’s personal assistant.
Inez Henry told me, “Miss Berry said that all we had to do to become successful was follow four basic rules: look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, and work like a horse.
“She had common sense, vision, faith, and a deep interest in people. She was born for a certain work in a certain age. I’ve seen her on the mountaintop, and I’ve seen her in the valley. But I never saw her ready to turn back.”
Martha Berry faced crisis after crisis. The culprit was always the same. Money was tight. Money was running out. The milk cows and hand-me-down quilts weren’t enough. Martha Berry lay awake long into the dark night, fearful that she might have to close the doors to her school.
Hope became as scarce as wrinkled dollar bills.
A student came running into her office one morning, carrying a newspaper clipping. “You need to talk to Henry Ford,” he said.
“The auto maker?”
“Yes, ma ‘am.”
“Why should I?”
“It says right here in the newspaper that he’s got a lot of money, and he’s giving it away to people who need it,” the boy said. He paused, then added, “I think we need it, Miss Berry.”
She nodded. That afternoon, she sat down and wrote Henry Ford, telling him about the dreams and hopes and aspirations she had for educating the mountain children of North Georgia. Maybe – just maybe – Mister Ford could provide some financial assistance.
Her letter arrived too late. By now, Henry Ford had become a bitter, cynical, and skeptical man. It often seemed to him that every person and every organization in the country was knocking on his door, looking for a handout, begging for free money. He had grown tired of it. He had grown jaded.
He did, however, send Martha Berry some money.
He sent her a single dime. Thin. Worn. Worth ten cents and nothing more.
Miss Berry could have been disappointed. She could have simply told herself, “Well, I tried, and it didn’t work out.”
Martha Berry was not disappointed at all. She took the dime down to a feed store and bought peanuts. She and her students diligently planted those peanuts, and, at season’s end, they harvested the peanuts and sold them for fifteen hundred dollars.
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