A home with Callaway history: For $5.8 million, all of this could be yours

It’s a rustic log home with a very colorful history situated on 127 acres with a beautiful lake and separate cottage. It also has an additional 1,005 acres of forest that is filled with potential trophy deer for those into hunting or nurturing wildlife.

The Lodge at Blue Springs in Harris County — off Georgia Hwy. 116 between Hamilton and Interstate 185’s exit 25 — also is adjacent to a couple of well-known neighbors. Dan Amos, chairman and chief executive officer of Columbus-based Aflac, and Jeff Foxworthy, a comedian and actor, both own nearby property.

The kicker is the lodge and surrounding grounds were constructed and developed in 1930 and 1931 by brothers Cason and Fuller Callaway — who had married sisters Virginia and Alice Hand — as a weekend retreat from their textile mill business in LaGrange, Ga.

Need more history? The 8286-square-foot home and farm through the years would entertain a circle of power, including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, U.S. Army General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, former First Lady “Lady Bird” Johnson, and President Jimmy Carter and wife Rosalynn Carter.

With that lineage, not surprisingly, The Lodge at Blue Springs was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 5, 2002. Its last occupant was Edward Callaway, grandson of Callaway Gardens founders Cason and Virginia Callaway and the retired president and CEO of the nature resort just a few miles north in Pine Mountain, Ga. The grandson last lived there about 18 months ago.

If the natural beauty of the home and land, and the historic pedigree of the property sounds good to you, it can all be yours for the tidy sum of $5,834,000. That’s the asking price for the structures and the acreage that goes with them. Another 2,000 acres adjoining the parcel, dubbed the “Memorial Forest,” also is available for lease long term for extra elbow room to hunt or to simply enjoy the natural landscape.

“You could really put a good 3,000 or 3,200 acres together right here, with the lodge being kind of the home base,” said Eric McCollum, an associate with The Wright Group, the Thomasville, Ga.-based real-estate and brokerage firm handling the sale of the property for the Ida Cason Callaway Foundation, which also owns Callaway Gardens.

“This is obviously the focal point of what’s here, but there are koi ponds and there are lakes and blueberry orchards and all kinds of different things out here that are really kind of cool,” McCollum said during a recent tour of the historic home and nearby grounds. “It’s just beautiful. It’s rolling hills and real pretty hardwood bottoms and mountain creeks out there.”

Callaway Gardens President and CEO Bill Doyle, who succeeded Edward Callaway as head of the tourist attraction in 2015, said Friday that the historic home isn’t being used at all now for any formal functions.

A member of the foundation’s board of trustees, Doyle said The Lodge at Blue Springs and the surrounding land are viewed as one of the foundation’s assets that is no longer critical to the mission and vision of Callaway Gardens, which has struggled financially and with attendance for nearly a decade.

“Basically, what we’ve done over the years is we have looked at non-core assets, I’ll call them,” Doyle said. “The home falls into that category. It’s eight miles from the resort and the gardens, so it’s not necessarily accretive to any attendance growth at the gardens. As we looked at it, given the timing and the fact that it’s not crucial to the foundation mission, we decided we would explore opportunities to sell it.”

Doyle did not say how proceeds from a property sale might be used. He noted that a roughly $750,000 renovation of the gardens’ bicycling trails has been completed and that other projects are under way to enhance the visitor experience at the resort that was founded in 1952. Don’t expect anything like a Ferris wheel to be installed, he stressed.

“The noble purpose of the garden hasn’t changed — connecting man and nature in a way that benefits both,” Doyle said. “We want to keep people active and outdoors, and we’re just going to enhance the assets that we do have — great fishing, great biking, great trails, beautiful lakes to enjoy, the Day Butterfly Center. We did an exterior renovation to that last year so that’s in tiptop shape. So we’re really working hard to give people more reason to come to Callaway every day.”

Still, there’s no doubt a few million dollars extra from the sale of the old Callaway family lodge would come in handy over the next few years as the resort works toward more stable financial ground.

McCollum believes the amenities of the property should be attractive to someone who is seeking a natural retreat and an attractive structure that is on a National Register. A hunter himself, the real-estate executive sees that as a major drawing card for the right person. He called the large swath of land one of the best deer-hunting properties in Georgia.

“Nobody’s hunted on the Memorial Forest land, I think, in 25 years. There’s no telling what’s running around over there. It’s unbelievable. It’s basically been just a nature preserve,” he said. “This particular area has really superior genetics from a deer-hunting standpoint. Everybody here has been quality deer managing their property. Like Danny Amos and Jeff Foxworthy, they all quality deer manage their herds and they kill just monster deer around here. They’re huge, huge deer. That’s a very attractive thing for the lodge and the acreage here from a deer hunter’s perspective.”

From a historical standpoint, the lodge is just as bountiful. The home and a later addition were designed by the Atlanta firm Ivey & Crook. The main living room with two rock fireplaces and large log beams overhead is a focal point, with the aforementioned famous guests having eaten at the long table in the center of the room.

There are artifacts and antiques galore throughout the two-story home, with there being several bedrooms, a library and office, and a connecting greenhouse and indoor pool added in 1955 that once served as a common recreational gathering area for the Callaway family and their guests.

One upstairs den called “The Gun Room” is loaded with history. It is said to have been a favorite place for President Roosevelt to sit during his visits to the home. The world leader would visit nearby Warm Springs, Ga., to use the therapeutic waters there for the polio that had left him paralyzed from the waist down.

“His leg braces would be removed and security men would carry him up the stairs and place him in the dark green upholstered chair” that is still there today, a passage from a history of the lodge reads.

Other visitors to “The Gun Room,” which included bar and library areas, included Eisenhower and Columbus native Robert W. Woodruff, the Coca-Cola magnate who would help “Ike” win the U.S. presidential race in 1952.

“It’s almost like a museum. That’s what it is,” McCollum said of the home and its various rooms.

Additional highlights of the overall property include 14-acre Lake Ida, a 2,057-square-foot gate house, the 1,884-square-foot guest cottage, a three-car garage with a wine cellar underneath, fruit orchards and a grass tennis court area.

This story was originally published March 12, 2017 at 12:37 AM with the headline "A home with Callaway history: For $5.8 million, all of this could be yours."