The Family Behind the Street Sign- Neely Farm, Part Two

The Neely Farm name provides a glimpse into its rich history. It was the country retreat and dairy farm from the 1930s to the early 1970s in what was then Norcross, where Frank Neely — a Southern-raised Renaissance man, Georgia Tech graduate, mechanical engineer and Rich’s Department store executive — delved into scientific agriculture in his spare time.

Neely purchased the land in the early 1930s from different owners, piecing it together into a 410-acre tract. “We don’t know whether they sold their land in order to feed their families in the Depression, which very well could’ve been the case,” Eve Hoffman speculated.

Hoffman is a local poet and author, the daughter of Neely’s only child, the late Rachel Neely Parker. While Hoffman resides on property adjacent to the subdivision, deeded to her by her grandfather, her two brothers who also own land in the area live elsewhere.

“We know that he was extremely busy downtown. At some point, he thought about trying to find some land about 20 miles out, where he could go on the weekends. But he never did anything part way,” Hoffman said. “What my brothers and I have really come to appreciate in the last 10 years is how forward thinking he was.”

Hoffman has been learning more about her illustrious grandfather through her own research. “He was chairman of the bond commission that created the viaducts downtown. He was chairman of the commission that built the new city hall. He was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board for the Southeast, where he instituted the notion of the kind of record keeping and statistics that has been picked up around the country. He was into computers when none of us had ever heard of them,” Hoffman said, rattling off some of her grandfather’s accomplishments.

He was talking about running nuclear power from Tech to Piedmont hospital for nuclear medicine, she noted. Georgia Tech even named their nuclear reactor after him; it was shut down in 1988.

“He wrote a book called “The Manager, a Human Engineer,” Hoffman said. “He created the phrase, ‘The customer is always right’ — and [Rich’s] instituted it. The stories are legendary. People would buy a set of dishes, have a dinner party and then bring all the dishes back. Rich’s never questioned it.”

She shared a story that during the Depression, schools in Atlanta didn’t have money to pay teachers. “They gave them scrip. Rich’s said, ‘Bring the scrip here and we’ll cash it. You don’t have to buy anything.’ The goodwill from that lasted well into the ‘50s and ‘60s.”

Neely also helped found public radio in Atlanta. He worked on the design of I-285 and was instrumental in bringing Lockheed Martin to Atlanta.

“He was extraordinary in a lot of ways,” Hoffman said. His interest in scientific farming led to the genesis of the Neely farm, which would eventually become the idyllic, suburban neighborhood we enjoy today.

Memories of grandad

“We called him Mimi,” she remembered. “He taught us our first swear word. He was a passionate GA Tech alum.”

Hoffman recalled once accompanying her grandfather on a Jeep ride to check on Mr. Duncan’s “corn crop” in the Spalding Corners area. Neely picked up some corn whiskey that day — Duncan was reputed to have the best. He would smuggle his supply on the creek that went through his property, came down through Neely Farm, onto the Chattahoochee and got off in Fulton County. The revenuers were never able to catch him.

“I have one flat whiskey bottle. It would probably kill you if you drank it now, but I will not let it go,” she chuckled.

The stuff of legends

Hoffman grew up in the circa-1850 two-story, white clapboard house on the farm that had been spared by General Sherman’s troops during the Civil War. It’s the oldest home in Neely Farm. Scrawled above the door in her old bedroom is the message: “Eve slept here.”

A legend surrounds the reason this home was not burned down by Sherman’s men. “I heard it growing up from different families, so I think there’s a lot of truth to it,” Hoffman recounted. “The men had all gone off to war. Sherman’s men were camped across the river. They would come across, and this was how they fed themselves; they stole chickens and hams.”

Tired of having their food sources stolen, the women fired a buckshot at the Union soldiers. A message was sent by the commanding officer, “Stop shooting my men!” The woman who lived there at the time — her last name was Nesbit — hooked her horse and buggy up, crossed the river at Holcomb Bridge and went to see the commanding officer.

“She went in his tent and visited for a long time. She was seen occasionally visiting again. No more chickens and hams were stolen,” Hoffman said. We both erupted into laughter and chalked it up to Nesbit’s courage, charm and diplomatic abilities.

Welcome to the farm

Neely and his wife, Rae, lived downtown and spent the weekends on the farm. “He would spend a good chunk of the weekend working with the farm people,” Hoffman said. “Every weekend, he covered every inch of this property. He was very scientific about it. He knew where every tree had gone down, where every fence needed to be painted and where every bull was. He knew it all.”

Neely was interested in agriculture as a means of rebuilding the impoverished South. His award-winning farm, a mixture of cultivated fields and open pastures, was one of the last two dairy farms in metro Atlanta.

“When the power went out due to storms, Neely Farm would be the first place in the county that Georgia Power would get back online — we had a 500-gallon tank of milk! Along Frank Neely Road, those trees would go down. They would come through with chainsaws, get that road cleared and those lines back up,” Hoffman said.

Neely aimed to preserve the land and make it better. “He worked with the agriculture people at the University of Georgia who told him to terrace the hills to cut down on runoff and erosion, and to get cattle, because cattle would naturally fertilize the fields,” she explained.

“The Neelys were never hungry, even during the Depression. But my grandmother had no fancy jewelry, no sign of wealth,” she added. “The wealth really went into buying a tractor or building a silo.”

The architect for the big house (now the clubhouse) was Henry Toombs. He designed part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s extra house in New York and the Little White House in Warm Springs. “Eleanor Roosevelt came here at one point to see what Neely was doing in agriculture. I have a page of her diary about coming out here, in a photograph,” Hoffman said.

The magnificent Mrs. Neely

Hoffman remembers that her grandmother, Rae, had magnificent gardens around the big house, and saw the farm as a way for her husband Frank to catch his breath. “She was an extraordinary woman. I always thought of my grandmother as protecting my grandfather. I didn’t realize how many other things she was doing,” Hoffman admitted.

Rae reworked the statistics office for the Superintendent of the Georgia Board of Education and was Secretary of the Georgia Women’s Suffrage movement. “She was president of a gazillion different things: garden clubs, community clubs and the Council of Jewish Women,” Hoffman said.

“I found articles she wrote about Women’s Suffrage, one published in the Atlanta paper. She said that women’s suffrage wasn’t just about women having the vote, it was about improving the lives of families, children, pregnant women and addressing hunger.”

Hoffman’s mother, Rachel, went to Smith College, which was the equivalent of an Ivy League school for women. “I went to Smith; my daughter went to Smith. It started with Rae Neely who read about Smith College in the paper,” Hoffman said.

Selling the farm

“Selling the farm was hard,” she confessed. “Frank Neely was gone by the time we sold the land. My mother ran it for a while; she was a massive stroke patient for 13 years. My brothers were in other cities. We were the only ones here, my husband and I, and our kids.”

Once the decision was made to sell it, Hoffman said there were all kinds of proposals. “When you have different people, their lawyers and accountants — I can tell you my husband [Howard Hoffman] was a genius.”

She continued to live here, so she experienced firsthand the conversion of her beloved family farm from a rural to a suburban setting. “It was hard to see the place go — really hard when the bulldozers started cutting in,” she said.

In her story, “Walking with Frank,” Hoffman suggests she felt her grandfather’s presence on her property. “I do believe there’s some kind of energy out there. I was walking down that hill and he was with me. He was there,” Hoffman affirmed.

To learn more about Eve Hoffman, find her latest book, “Memory & Complicity,” at amazon.com and mercerceruniversitypress.com.

What’s in a Name?

According to Eve Hoffman, the street names proposed by the developer were multi-syllabic, North American Indian names that bore little relationship to this part of the country. Instead, she and her family suggested they choose names that were meaningful to them. That’s why I personally live on Rachel Ridge — the street named after her mother — and not on Hiawassee Drive.