11.30.20-12.6.20
What I’m Watching: The Undoing
At the risk of spoiling anything, I’ll just say that Penn Badgley in You is a much more realistic sociopath.
What I’m Reading: Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words
If you’ve watched the documentary on Netflix, you’ll already be familiar with most of the anecdotes in the first half of the book. But as the marriage between Diana and Charles continues to deteriorate in the early nineties, the book goes into deeper detail. Maybe it’s because we all know now that Diana was interviewed for the book, but I just can’t believe people didn’t figure that out when it was first published.
What I’m Eating: Ample Hills Ice Cream— homemade!
Alan found the Ample Hills Creamery cookbook at Goodwill, and I got an ice cream maker for my birthday. I’ve made three batches of ice cream in the past two weeks: vanilla, coffee Heath Bar crunch, and mint chocolate chip. The last two batches were incredible.
What I’m Googling: “1876 house restaurant”
My mom was in town this weekend, which of course got me thinking about a fuzzy event from my childhood. Her then-boyfriend picked us up in a white limo, and we drove to a restaurant outside Atlanta. It was a big white plantation house with a swing out front. I remember nothing else; I was seven. For my seventh birthday party just the day before, I was surprised with a black limo pulling up outside my house as I opened presents, and my party was shuttled to a nearby showing of the Pokemon movie. It was a crazy weekend and I haven’t been in a limo since.
When I asked mom what the restaurant was called, she said, “Oh it’s the 1876 House or something.”
That is not what it’s called.
My first search result was the ‘76 House, which is in Tappan, New York and was actually built in 1668. Second was the 1896 House Inn, a former milking barn turned hotel in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. This wasn’t working, so I changed to “former plantation restaurant”, which pulled up a restaurant in Medicine Park, Oklahoma. Searching Google Maps for “restaurant house” near me brings up every Waffle House in the Atlanta area.
I then searched “former plantation restaurant atlanta”, which didn’t give me any leads but did lead me to a very long and detailed article about something called Aunt Fanny’s Cabin in Smyrna, GA. This is worth an aside.
From its opening four days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor until its closure fifty years later, Aunt Fanny’s Cabin was a popular plantation-themed (read: racist) restaurant in Cobb county. The restaurant’s founder, Isoline Campbell, was born in 1893 into one of Atlanta’s elite families: the owners of the Campbell Coal Company, the largest coal company in the South. Her family’s “Argyle Farm” in present-day Smyrna was their country retreat from the growing city. Isoline was a society girl, and she was actually in Germany on her grand tour when the First World War broke out— detained as a spy and forced to flee Europe with an emergency passport. Her experience prompted her to serve as the Atlanta Junior League’s first president, fundraising for Atlanta’s needy and assisting the war effort with the YMCA Canteen in Europe. Through the roaring twenties and most of the Great Depression, she split her time between Boston and Miami with her husband William Jay McKenna, the owner of a paint company. By 1936, she was divorced and living in Atlanta again.
In the late 1930s, an idealized vision of the antebellum south was promoted in the novel and subsequent film phenomenon Gone with the Wind. Isoline Campbell built on this romanticized image by remodeling an old tenant house on her family’s Argyle Farm, filling it with antiques and knick-knacks, and mythologizing one of her family’s domestic servants, Fanny Williams. Williams, who was born four years after the Civil War ended and never lived in her eponymous cabin, was said to have served four generations of the Campbell family who recalled “being bounced on her knee and listening wide-eyed to her tales of the War Between the States.” In reality, Williams had only worked for one generation of Campbells and was an active member of the Wheat Street Baptist Church, so noted for its civil rights activism in the 1920s and 1930’s that some say the KKK attempted to burn a cross in her front yard.
Anyway, no, I haven’t found the restaurant we went to when I was seven.
