The Dark End of the South

At the Deerlick Astronomy Village in Taliaferro County, Georgia, the second least populous county east of the Mississippi River, residents share one concern above all others: the ability to see the stars in their fullest glory.

Story by Rebecca McCarthy | Photos by Johnathon Kelso

A few hours before meeting Dan Ford, I had driven to Deerlick through a landscape of lonesome pine forests — at $4 million, timber accounted for most of Taliaferro’s 2017 agricultural market value. An occasional trailer or abandoned house interrupted the trees. Few pickups passed me. As I drove along, I thought about an extravagant Christmas display on Highway 22 outside Crawfordville operated by Jean and Earl Bennett decades ago called “Christmas in Dixie.” It drew more than 50,000 people, but there’s no trace of that left. In 1994, vandals destroyed exhibits and smashed lights, prompting Jean to say of a ruined Santa, “Down in the dirt he was that day and his head was found six miles away.” Christmas in Dixie closed in 1997. Jean and Earl have both passed.

The county has no grocery stores, no fast food outlets, no all-night convenience stores, no high school stadium, no big boxes. There is a Dollar General store on U.S. 278 that opened in 2018. 

People call it “The Mall.”

Jane Kuehn, a Deerlick resident, introduced me to Dan Ford. Like her, he lives in the subdivision full-time, as do three other members. Other astronomers, some of whom don’t live in Georgia, come on the weekends or for vacation. For groceries, dentist or doctor visits, or entertainment, they drive to Washington, Greensboro or Athens.

Jane is in her early 70s, with blue eyes that don’t miss a thing, a fast smile and a sturdy handshake. She wants me — wants everyone, in fact — to enjoy looking at the heavens and marveling at the planets and stars. I peer through Dan’s telescope. I see first Jupiter and then its four largest moons, first spotted and named by Galileo. I am thrilled. I feel like jumping up and down. 

“Do y’all know the …”

Like schoolchildren chanting the alphabet, Jane and Dan say, “Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto.” I tell them how impressed I am by this recitation, and both smile, making me think any stargazer worth his salt should know Jupiter’s four Galilean moons by name, and probably the remaining 63 moons as well, even the smallest of them — little Jupiter LI. I don’t tell them I know nothing but the Big Dipper and a few constellations. I return to studying Jupiter.

You know that big red spot on Jupiter’s face? You ought to see it through a telescopic lens. Dan tells me it’s thought to be a hurricane that has been roaring on the planet for 300 years. Information gleaned from the Hubble space telescope shows the winds generating the hurricane are reversing their direction. I hope this reversal doesn’t mean the red spot will shrink or disappear altogether.

Jane Kuehn eyes a toy astronaut.

Dan is one of the five founders of Deerlick, all of whom were members of the Atlanta Astronomy Club. They used to trek to the North Georgia Mountains, far from the light pollution of metro Atlanta, before they decided to find a site closer to home. They headed in all directions. One member came east and was driving around Taliaferro County when he passed through the tiny town of Sharon and came into Raytown, an unincorporated area a few miles away. 

He spotted a historic marker on the road commemorating native sons Aaron Grier, a Revolutionary War hero, and Robert Grier, his son, an amateur astronomer who studied mathematics and science on his own, reading widely in his father’s extensive library. The younger Grier first published The Georgia and South Carolina Almanack in 1807, later renamed Grier’s Almanac. With its weather predictions, phases of the moon and times for sunset and sunrise, Grier’s became indispensable for Southern farmers. The publication made Grier rich. In 1825, Grier became the guardian of his sister’s orphaned teenage son, Alexander H. Stephens, who later became the vice president of the Confederacy. Unlike his uncle, he is buried in Taliaferro County, where his grave and house have attracted thousands of Civil War buffs.

Two hundred and twelve years after it first appeared, Grier’s little magazine is still in print, with more than 2 million subscribers. The Grier descendants don’t own the publication, but farmers still depend on it.

Dan Ford and his friends thought that if Taliaferro County was good enough for Grier, it was good enough for the Atlanta Astronomy Club. They bought 98 acres, including land that was part of Grier’s plantation, and clear cut 70 to widen the horizons as much as possible, leaving a buffer and leaving some land for guests who want to camp or hook up an RV. They had the site graded, put in roads and infrastructure and chopped it up into lots. Today, all but three of the 28 parcels have sold or are being leased — Dan paid roughly $35,000 for his two acres. In other parts of the county, undeveloped land goes for $3,000 an acre.

“We knew Taliaferro had a small population, and that’s what we wanted,” says Dan, who moved to Deerlick permanently from Marietta with his wife when he retired. “We wanted no light and few people.”

Driving maybe two miles an hour, I make my way out of Deerlick to the paved road, heading to my friend’s house in Sharon. I follow the taillights of a single car heading into Crawfordville and see a light in a distant window. My friend is already in bed. As I lie down to sleep in the guest room, I hear only the chirping of crickets and peeping of tree frogs. Were it not for having teenagers at home, I think I could live in such quiet, especially with a telescope.

A few days later, Jane Kuehn and Dave Lacko, another Deerlick member, are telling me about their astronomy fascination and how they ended up in Taliaferro County. We are sitting with Sharon Mayor Reneé Brown in her kitchen, eating lunch. Sleeping on my feet is Brown’s dog Sweetie Pie, a friendly Corgi-terrier rescued from a dump.

While Reneé and Jane pass around chicken salad and grapes, Dave says he bought his lot at Deerlick without ever laying eyes on it. He read about a “star party” on the internet that astronomers were having in Taliaferro County and bought a lot before the subdivision was even prepared. He was working as a diemaker at Ford Motor Company in Michigan — “Didn’t you just retire?” Jane asks, and he nods — and when officials there learned he planned to move to Georgia, they put him in touch with a Ford attorney in Atlanta.

“She asked why I wanted to move to Taliaferro and said it’s the poorest county in Georgia, but I told her I didn’t care,” he says. The U.S. Census says 26.5 percent of the Taliaferro population is in poverty, but that grim statistic doesn’t make it the poorest county in Georgia. At 37.4 percent, Wheeler County, about 120 miles south, is poorer.

“We may be poor, but this a place where people know each other and look after each other,” Reneé says. “It’s a true community.”

Taliaferro’s poverty level didn’t dissuade Dave. He said he believed there were advantages to living in a rural area. In Michigan, he indulged his passion for visual astronomy by setting up his telescope in a state park outside Detroit.

“I always felt … well … uneasy there,” he says. “Deerlick is a gated community, and there’s no one around at all. It’s great.”

His wife prefers digging in the earth to looking at the stars. 

“And you should see her flowers!” says Jane. “They are so beautiful!”

Before he learned about Deerlick, Dave was planning to retire in Arizona. In addition to visual astronomy, he likes radio astronomy. He says he regularly listens to Jupiter and to the sun, where a solar burst sends out a radio wave that sounds like popcorn popping. His house is smaller than his observatory.

“And those observatories aren’t cheap,” says Mayor Brown. She passes around a dish of handmade chocolates.

“Not at all,” says Jane. She takes a couple of candies. “When it comes to property taxes, we are a cash cow.” She chews the chocolate. “I’d say we’re the best kept secret in the county. Some people still don’t know we exist, and some people think we’re astrologers.”

Mayor Brown has lived in Sharon since the early 1980s. Her former husband and she, and their sons, moved from Atlanta to Taliaferro, where his family had lived for seven generations. They settled in a Sharon house that has been in his family since the 1890s. Eventually, the husband left; the boys and Reneé stayed. She taught public school in Washington, 12 miles away, and later served as Taliaferro school superintendent before becoming Sharon’s mayor 10 years ago.

Sharon has had no trouble accepting the astronomers, Reneé says. It has experience welcoming all kinds of people. It’s home to the oldest Catholic church in Georgia, the Church of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was organized in 1801 in the Catholic settlement of Locust Grove, two miles away. Though the church and Catholic school moved to Sharon, Locust Grove remains the setting of the state’s oldest Catholic cemetery, which dates from 1794.

“That’s why, I think, people have accepted me, the only Jewish person in the county,” Reneé says. She laughs. “When I die, I’m going to be buried in the graveyard at the Sharon cemetery. I had the rabbi come and consecrate the ground.”

The mayor and the astronomer.

She says the Deerlick residents asked Sharon officials to change the city’s streetlights with LEDs that face downward, to reduce light pollution. When the residents offered to pay Georgia Power to change the lights, for $50 each, the mayor happily agreed. 

“I can’t tell you how many people live in Sharon, maybe 140, but I can tell you the number of streetlights we have — 27!” she says, laughing.

The new streetlights are more energy-efficient, and when one burns out, Georgia Power receives an alert and replaces it. Jane and Dave have tried to convince the owner of a billboard on Interstate 20 to install downward facing lights, but so far, nothing has changed.

“Give Jane enough time, and she’ll get it done,” says Reneé. “She knows everyone and goes to everything.”

Jane laughs, loud and joyous. She’s the de facto ambassador for Deerlick and pops up everywhere in Taliaferro County. In the early 2000s, her husband, John, and she were living in Maryland, where he was working for defense contractor Raytheon after a career in the U.S. Navy. He was the lifelong astronomer; Jane was the patient companion. 

At an astronomy event in Toronto, they heard about a star party in Deerlick and decided to check it out. A few months after the trip, in 2008, they bought property in Deerlick and began visiting for a few weeks at a time, waiting until John retired to move.

“Those two years, coming here, it was very contemplative to me, very restorative,” Jane says. “I could relax, rest, and read.” By 2010, the couple had turned over their Maryland home to their son and parked their RV in Deerlick, deciding they didn’t want the burden of caring for another house. The Kuehns and their dog are doing fine.

“Astronomy is a solitary endeavor, but my natural proclivity is to be out and about,” Jane says. She’s curious about everything and joins whatever group needs members. From the county historical society to an organizing committee for the Sharon Shenanigans festival to working on a community garden to giving a ride to a church member, you can spot Jane. She is spearheading the effort to have Deerlick designated a Dark Sky Park by the International Dark Skies Association and hopes to hear something by year’s end.

She traded her 4,000-member megachurch in Maryland to join the 40-member Raytown Baptist, an integrated congregation she can walk to “where people accept me. I talk funny and have a different vocabulary, but they love me anyway.”

In downtown Crawfordville on a Sunday afternoon, the members of the Taliaferro County Historical Society gather in the Stewart Center, two buildings owned by Randy Stewart that used to house a grocery store and a hardware store. Different groups use it for meetings, including the chamber of commerce, of which Randy is the president. He worked for Johnson & Johnson and Baxter Healthcare before returning home to Taliaferro.

“Sure, people know about the astronomers, but people here are retired, and they’re tired at the end of the day, and they go to sleep,” he says. “They’re not up in the middle of the night, looking at stars.”

A collection of NASA memorabilia in a Deerlick resident’s home.

Many of the historical society’s members are older, having moved home to Taliaferro, like Randy, after having careers elsewhere. Jane sits near the door, speaking to people as they enter, calling everyone by name. Several women carry cakes, chips and dips, vegetable plates, and other treats to share after the program. Mark Albertin, a filmmaker and amateur historian from Augusta, has come to make a presentation on a local phenomenon.

In the late 1800s, Taliaferro wasn’t the least populated county in Georgia, and it wasn’t known for being dark. We learn that instead, it was famous across the state, and even the region, for the Electric Mound Hotel. The story goes that the Rev. A.L. Hillman, who lived a few miles outside Sharon, was mining for gold or alum when he felt “an electric current” run through his body. After he made subsequent trips down the shaft to continue his search, Hillman noticed the rheumatism that had plagued him had left. If he could benefit from this electricity — probably a magnetic anomaly in a granite outcropping — why couldn’t others? 

After hearing about Hillman’s discovery, Atlanta newspaper publisher Henry W. Grady financed the building of a 40-room hotel near the site, and then provided publicity about the healing powers of the “electric rocks” in his Atlanta Constitution. A little boomtown grew up around the hotel. Hundreds of people rode the train from Atlanta to Taliaferro County, where they stayed in the hotel, sometimes for days at a time. So many people were supposedly cured after a few sessions in the shaft that the hotel had a storage room for discarded crutches and canes.

After Grady’s death in 1886, the hotel continued to attract crowds seeking relief until 1901, when it burned to the ground. “And you can bet it was fully insured!” says one older man. Laughter ripples through the audience. 

There’s nothing left today save for a few foundation stones barely visible in the overgrown brush. The little town of Hillman is gone as well.

Kay Stewart, whose husband is Crawfordville Mayor Larry Stewart, tells the historical society members that Larry and she were once taking a tour of the site with a few other people and were on the road around the hotel. The needle on a compass Larry was holding started spinning and the battery in his video camera went dead. 

“I had always been really skeptical about the shock rocks, but I couldn’t explain what happened,” he says later. He has returned to Hillman since then, “but I’ve never been able to reproduce what happened.”

Equally impressive to Mayor Stewart is the collection of telescopes, equipment and astronomers outside Sharon at Deerlick. Unlike most people in the county, he has visited the subdivision and says, “It’s just first-class. It’s amazing what all they have out there and what they can do. By now, I think that most people know the astronomers are in Deerlick, but they just don’t care.”

When out-of-town astronomers come to stargaze in Taliaferro, some use guest camping facilities at Deerlick. Others rent cabins or camp at the 1,100-acre Alexander H. Stephens State Park in Crawfordville, where Andre McLendon is the manager. 

“We don’t have any hotels in town, so they stay at the park,” he says. A Taliaferro native, Manager McLendon began working in the park after finishing high school and studying electronics at Athens Tech. He says he worked his way up to his current job as he moves to answer the ringing phone on his desk.

His office is in an administration building that resembles the Little White House at Warm Springs. Adjacent is a small pond with a collection of paddle boats for rent. As soon as he hangs up, the phone rings again. Another employee answers this call.

“I love my job, and I love the park,” Andre says. “We get Boy Scouts, church groups, family reunions, Girl Scouts, 4-H kids. We have between 75,000 and 80,000 visitors every year.”

A statue of Alexander H. Stephens in the Georgia State Park that bears his name.

Does it bother him that some visitors venerate Alexander Stephens? 

He shakes his head. “All that stuff about Alexander Stephens, well, that’s just history.” The phone rings again, someone asking about accommodations for a family reunion. I pick up a brochure showing the park includes not only Stephens’ house and library but also a Confederate museum, cabins, trails, stables, group camping facilities and a 30-foot fire tower, all built or rehabilitated by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. The whole place is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Andre hangs up the phone. He says he’s very familiar with Deerlick Astronomy Village. He smiles when I mention Jane’s name. He’s talking with her about the astronomers bringing a blowup planetarium to the park, a sort of bouncy house with projections of the planets. Folks from Deerlick participate in an annual Christmas lights event at the park, usually donating an illuminated, eight-foot full moon. 

For Andre, Taliaferro remains the same caring community it was when he was growing up. Everyone helps everyone else and takes care of each other as best they can. But some things have changed, and for the better, he says: There’s a new café on the square, for one, and Harrison Poultry is building a chicken feed mill, for another. The company has bought 300 acres outside Crawfordville, near the CSX train line.

“They say they’re going to have a hatchery in the next phase, and then a processing plant, and that will mean more than 200 jobs,” he says. “That’s a positive thing for the community. Maybe it will give people here jobs.”

When I ask Jane what she thinks about the chicken complex, which is expected to operate around the clock, she has just one question: How will Harrison Poultry light it? And will they be open to the idea of reducing light pollution?

About a mile from McLendon’s office is downtown Crawfordville. It hasn’t changed much since it was rebuilt in 1910, even though many businesses are gone. It’s a beautiful little downtown, with high sidewalks, crepe myrtles and red brick buildings, anchored by a majestic two-story county courthouse built in 1902. It’s been the perfect setting for Hollywood movies set in the early 20th century, including, most recently, the 2009 film “Get Low” with Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Bill Murray.

So many movies have been filmed in the county that there’s a small museum celebrating its ties to Hollywood. Robert Harold Kendrick, 89, and his wife Myrtle earned $10 an hour as extras in “Get Low.” Unlike other film casts, he says, everyone in “Get Low” was friendly. He’s glad movie people have used Crawfordville as a setting, but it pains him to see his hometown in decline. Like many of the county’s other residents, he returned to Taliaferro after his career ended — he played semi-pro baseball and served in the military.

“What killed the town was Interstate 20,” he says. “That and Walmart. Before the highway opened, people would drive through going from Atlanta to Augusta, and they’d stop. We had grocery stores and dry-goods stores.”

People who have driven on Highway 278 may remember a café on the Crawfordville city square called Mrs. Bonner’s. It closed in 1997, and the café sat empty until Nick Flores, a transplant, opened Mama Chucha’s in the building a few years ago. He had spent years as a chef for Marriott International Inc. in Dallas, Atlanta, and Washington, where he directed banquets for 1,000 to 10,000 people. He lives in an apartment next to the café.

Mama Chucha’s serves three meals a day, including a four-course gourmet dinner the first Monday of every month for $30, attracting both local people, including Deerlick residents, and the well-heeled from Lake Oconee. It’s become so popular, you need to make reservations far in advance.

Day-to-day, Flores offers fare that includes pancakes, biscuits, hamburgers, fried-fish plates, steak, burritos, and pasta. The food is tasty, not fancy, the portions are generous, and the clientele is thankful to have an in-town place to gather and eat. A lunch crowd includes people of all ages, stages, and colors, all of whom seem to know Nick and each other.

“For a while, people were saying they didn’t know if I was going to make it,” Flores says. “My mother and father taught me you don’t stop until you achieve want you want to achieve. I think I can make it here. The tranquility, for me, it’s great.”

The peace and quiet she has found in Taliaferro County sustains Jane Kuehn as well. On a clear night, while other astronomers are sleeping, having set their computers to take multiple time-lapsed exposures of the sky, Jane sometimes wakes at 2 a.m., wraps herself in a sheet, grabs a pair of binoculars and steps outside. She settles into a chaise lounge and leans back, watching the sky, picking out the constellations, counting shooting stars.

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