This is the enigmatic Phoenix Academy, where Joel Chandler Harris attended school as a young man while working as a print devil for famed plantation publisher Joseph Addison Turner (1826-1868). It was saved and relocated to its present location in the mid-1970s by an Atlanta architect who owned the surrounding property, itself an historic antebellum plantation. More about that after a little background.

PLEASE NOTE: This property is not publicly accessible and trespassing is closely monitored by multiple means.

Phoenix Academy was built in the vicinity of Turnwold, northeast of Eatonton, circa 1860. The area is historically identified as Phoenix on maps. The house known as Turnwold today, the Lane-Turner House, was actually one of two on a large working plantation, the other being the older Alexander-Turner House. Joseph Addison Turner, published The Countryman, a weekly newspaper, from his property, the Alexander-Turner House. The Countryman was the only periodical ever published from a plantation during the Civil War and was widely read throughout the confederacy. His brother, William Wilberforce Turner (1830-1879), who lived in the Lane-Turner House, came up with the Turnwold name for the plantation, according to the National Register of Historic Places, and Joseph like it so much he applied to the entire property. (Turnwold means “Turner’s field”).

Union Academy, built circa 1820 by William Turner (1787-1853), the patriarch of the Turner family, originally stood on the site, but it was lost to fire*. Some time later, Phoenix Academy was built in its place. William Howard Seward, who served as Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, was an early rector at Union Academy. Joseph Addison Turner taught and served as president of the board of trustees for Phoenix Academy. He saw promise in a young, poorly educated Joel Chandler Harris, and encouraged him to attend school in the mornings while he apprenticed as a print devil for The Countryman in the afternoons. From his experiences among the enslaved people at Turnwold flowed Harris’s inspiration for the Uncle Remus stories. Though the Uncle Remus canon faded from popularity long before justified modern academic and social debates about controversial topics arose, mostly due to their rural subject matter and stereotypical portrayal of African-Americans, Harris remains a foundational figure in the history of Southern literature, if for no other reason than preserving the lost language of the enslaved and for his firsthand accounts of plantation life. A recent study found: Generations of Putnam County’s children, both black and white, have grown up with Harris, Remus, and Br’er Rabbit looming in the background of their lives. Yet in an age when the Harris books have fallen out of favor and Disney has permanently shelved the 1948 film version, nearly 100% of Putnam’s students engaged in this project acknowledge having never previously read a single Uncle Remus story.

*- (The date of the fire, and of the construction of Phoenix academy, is unclear; the National Register dates it to circa 1862 but also describes it as “antebellum”. I believe it may date to earlier in the 1850s and was assigned the 1862 date due to the Joel Chandler Harris association. The National Register also notes: “Over the years as the student body grew, a larger structure was constructed alongside the academy. The original Phoenix Academy became the headmaster’s residence until the academy’s closing, when it became a tenant residence. The second Phoenix School was torn down approximately ten years ago (c. 1965). Like many rural schoolhouses of the period, Phoenix Academy is of the Greek Revival style. It exhibits a pediment, pilasters with Ionic-order scrolls and molding around the door and window frames. The unusually fine application of Greek Revival details to one of the few surviving examples of rural antebellum academies in Georgia makes Phoenix Academy a unique and noteworthy structure.”).

Now, back to the story of how Phoenix Academy wound up clear across Putnam County. It’s all due to the foresight of architect and preservationist Earl McMillen, Jr. (1938-2007), who practiced in Atlanta and purchased the historic Singleton Plantation in 1968. When McMillen learned of the imminent demolition of the schoolhouse circa 1975, he acquired it from Putnam County and brought it to his property, where he painstakingly put it back together, just as it had originally stood. Its connection to Joel Chandler Harris was too important to be lost, McMillen rightfully believed. He did remove a rear wing, which had been added later in its history. It was used a rural schoolhouse well into the 20th century for children who lived in the area of Turnwold. An early 1900s photograph of Phoenix School, which the old academy was known as by then, shows that the school had a small front porch with a shed roof, but that was likely not original and was also removed by Mr. McMillen. I’m honored to be able to share these photographs, and am grateful to Dutch Henderson for the introduction, and to the Odum family for their generosity in allowing me to do so and for their continued stewardship of this important piece of Southern history. I’ll share more of their historic property in the next post.