For sale: 7,456 acres of Cason Callaway estate land for $42.5 million

It’s a pristine piece of property in Harris County, just north of Columbus, groomed for some of the best deer and turkey hunting in Georgia with zero development allowed for decades.

The 7,456 acres, known as the Cason Callaway Woodland Estate, also has a number of well-known landowner neighbors — Aflac Chief Executive Officer Dan Amos, actor and comedian Jeff Foxworthy, Realtree hunting founder Bill Jordan, Waffle House CEO Joe Rogers Jr., and real-estate developer Brad Smith.

The bottom line? The rolling landscape, with its mature hardwood forests, 38-acre stocked lake, meandering streams and fertile bottom lands, can now be yours for the tidy sum of $42.5 million.

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

Tom Brickman, a real-estate broker with Birmingham, Ala.-based Cyprus Partners, agreed that the Callaway property is the cream of the crop in the Harris County area. It doesn’t hurt that it has the name of the environmentally sensitive Cason Callaway attached to it. It was Cason and wife, Virginia Hand Callaway, both who passed away years ago, who founded and developed Callaway Gardens starting in the 1950s.

“What makes it special is that Cason Callaway put the land together in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s,” said Brickman, noting the man famed for cultivating the gardens accumulated about 40,000 acres of property altogether through the years.

“It’s got some unique features to it like hand-laid stone water control features around the lake,” he said. “It’s got a very unique silt control system around the lake because a lot of this property was worn-out cotton land at the time they put it together. So he restored all of this land from being abandoned farmland and made it what it is today.”

Brickman said that Cason Callaway Woodland Estate, which is being sold by the family of the late Howard “Bo” Callaway, including his son and former Callaway Gardens CEO Edward Callaway, has been on the market about a year.

There have been “quite a few” people looking at the land, but none have taken the sizeable financial bite to date. That doesn’t surprise Brickman, who has been selling real estate for 40 years. That includes some smaller 2,000- and 3,000-acre parcels he has sold previously in the general area of the Callaway woodlands. Cyprus Partners overall has closed nearly 700 deals totaling more than 175,000 acres in nine states.

“There’s not a lot of folks in the world that can stroke a check for $42 million. It’s not like selling your house,” he said. “We’ve got more time on our listing, plenty of time, so we’re hopeful we’ll get it done in the next year or so. I’ve got listings that sell right away and you don’t know why, and I’ve got listings that don’t. It’s hard to say sometimes.”

The 7,456 acres, in a way, are similar to another property for sale nearby it in Harris County. Real-estate firm The Wright Group, based in Thomasville, Ga., has been marketing about 1,132 acres of land that includes a historic log home built by Cason Callaway and his brother, Fuller, years ago. The asking price on that unique package of dwelling and land is just over $5.8 million.

“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,” Eric McCollum, an associate with The Wright Group, said during a tour earlier this year of the historic home and grounds being sold by the Ida Cason Callaway Foundation, which also owns Callaway Gardens. Ida Cason Callaway was the mother of Cason. “It’s just beautiful. It’s rolling hills and real pretty hardwood bottoms and mountain creeks out there.”

Both McCollum and Brickman rave about the large deer roaming the woods in the area, with the deep-pocket landowners in the neighborhood able to spend money to keep out development, while nurturing it wildlife management techniques that attract and grow healthy deer herds.

“This particular area has really superior genetics from a deer-hunting standpoint,” McCollum said. “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.”

Brickman said it is a matter of the nearby landowners having the money to “do the right thing,” which is keeping the forestlands in the area undeveloped and untouched by timber companies. That leads to the unusually high quality of deer.

“The property sits in the middle of 33,000 acres of large ownerships, and most of these ownerships are by celebrity folks,” the real-estate broker said. “Jeff Foxworthy joins it, Bill Jordan at Realtree joins it, Joe Rogers, who owns Waffle House, joins it. Brad smith, who’s a real-estate developer in Atlanta, joins it, and of course, the Callaway Foundation lands join it on the south side ... All of these owners are interested in hunting and wildlife game management.”

Brickman said it would be akin to “mistreatment” should a timber purchaser acquire the large swath of land. Asked when the best time to view the forests would be, he responded that it can depend on the season.

“The azaleas, of course, are blooming in the spring, so that’s a pretty time of the year,” he said. “My favorite time is the spring. Fall’s also a good time. You can see a long way in the winter because leaves are off the trees. That’s kind of cool. Summer, it’s hard to see the property and it’s hot, so it’s not the best time.”

Cyprus Partners has been marketing the property nationally, Brickman said. That means it is hard to guess what type of buyer might step forward to plunk down the $42.5 million for the land that the real-estate firm’s marketing material has referred to as like a “national park.”

“It could be a celebrity sort,” Brickman said. “It could be a neighbor, eventually. But a celebrity business executive. It could be a corporation looking for a corporate-type getaway retreat for their stockholders, employees and customers and that sort of thing ... So it could be a high net-worth individual or it could be a corporation.”

This story was originally published May 25, 2017 at 4:41 PM with the headline "For sale: 7,456 acres of Cason Callaway estate land for $42.5 million."