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Thomasville Quail Plantations

The Hanna and Wade Winter Retreats in South Georgia's Red Hills Region

The names Hanna and Wade are immediately familiar to most longtime Clevelanders. These families amassed fortunes in industries such as iron, oil, coal, steel, tobacco, shipping, telegraphs, railroads, and finance at a time when Cleveland was on the rise, and they poured tremendous sums of philanthropic money into education, healthcare, and the arts. Their names appear throughout the city—Hanna Building, Hanna Theatre, Hanna House at University Hospitals, Wade Park, Wade Oval, Wade Lagoon, Wade Chapel—and one will find their names among the prominent funds that support the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art. However, fewer Clevelanders may know that the Hanna and Wade legacies are just as visible in the Red Hills region of southwestern Georgia near the Florida border.

Starting in the 1890s, wealthy Clevelanders were among the northern elites who transitioned from staying at the fashionable winter resort hotels of Thomasville, Georgia, to owning former cotton plantations, transforming them into private retreats and quail hunting grounds. One of the earliest Cleveland investors in the Red Hills was Howard Melville Hanna, born in New Lisbon, Ohio, in 1840. After moving to Cleveland in 1852 and serving in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War, Hanna invested in an oil refinery that he sold to his friend John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company of Ohio, as well as in iron and steel, tobacco, and shipping. He also worked closely with his older brother Marcus Alonzo Hanna in the M. A. Hanna Company.

In 1896, while his brother Mark was actively managing William McKinley’s presidential bid, “Mel” Hanna bought not one but two large former cotton plantations in the pine-studded Red Hills southwest of Thomasville. At the time, Thomasville remained a popular wintertime destination for wealthy northerners, even as new railroads built by Henry Flagler and Henry’s Plant opened newer resorts deep into Florida. While Florida’s coastal resorts would eventually eclipse Thomasville’s popularity, the Red Hills continued its appeal as a hunting paradise with hundreds of thousands of acres of woodlands known for abundant bobwhite quail, wild turkeys, doves, and ducks.

Hanna’s first purchase was a plantation previously owned by his nephew, Charles Merrill Chapin, who had bought it in 1891. (Chapin’s mother Salome Marie Hanna Chapin was Mel Hanna’s younger sister.) The estate, which had originally belonged to Paul Coalson, included an antebellum house that probably dated to the 1830s. Upon acquiring the property, Hanna renamed it Melrose Plantation. A few months later, he bought the adjacent Pebble Hill Plantation, whose main house—built in 1850 by some of the thirty-seven people enslaved by planter William Henry Mitchell—had been unoccupied for 15 years.

Mel and his wife Kate spent their winters at Melrose, joined by their children Kate Benedict, Howard Melville Jr., and Mary Gertrude. In 1905, Hanna expanded the main house, and after his death in 1921, his son hired the renowned Cleveland architectural firm Walker and Weeks, to design Georgian Revival–style cottages, barns, and outbuildings. Among these was a private theater, Showboat, which hosted the first private screening of Gone with the Wind in 1939. After Hanna Jr.’s death in 1945, his daughters, Fanny (Mrs. Julian Castle Bolton) and Kate (Mrs. Warren Bicknell Jr., named for her aunt) shared the estate. Eventually, in 1952, they divided Melrose, creating a separate estate for Kate and Warren Bicknell called Sinkola Plantation.

Meanwhile, in 1901, Mel Hanna deeded Pebble Hill to his daughter, Kate Benedict Hanna Ireland, for the symbolic sum of one dollar. She lived there with her husband, Robert Livingston Ireland (also of Cleveland), and later with her second husband Perry W. Harvey. The Harveys expanded Pebble Hill from 3,000 to 10,000 acres. In 1934, two years after her husband died, Kate Harvey’s antebellum main house burned down, leaving only the loggia standing. She then commissioned Cleveland architect Abram Garfield (son of U.S. President James A. Garfield) to build a new fireproof 28-room mansion combining Federal and Greek Revival styles. Kate Harvey lived just four months after its completion. Pebble Hill then passed to Her daughter, Elizabeth “Pansy” Ireland Poe, inherited the estate and lived there for four decades. In 1950, she established the Pebble Hill Foundation, ensuring preservation of the estate as a historic house museum, which opened to the public in 1983.

In 1905, Hanna purchased a third Thomasville estate, Winnstead Plantation, which he gifted to his daughter Mary Gertrude and her husband, Coburn Haskell. Haskell, a former employee of the M. A. Hanna Company, had left to pursue the manufacture of his 1899 patented invention of the modern golf ball. After his death in 1922, Mary Gertrude remained at Winnstead until her passing in 1945, after which the family sold the property.

The Hanna legacy in Thomasville extended well beyond these estates. Kate Benedict Hanna Ireland’s son, Robert Livingston Ireland Jr., co-owned Foshalee and Ring Oak plantations with Cleveland businessman David S. Ingalls. When Mel Hanna’s grandson Howard Melville Hanna III died in 1936, his widow Pamela remarried Cleveland lawyer and M. A. Hanna president George M. Humphrey. Humphrey built a mansion at Milestone Plantation, which became an occasional retreat for President Dwight D. Eisenhower during Humphrey’s tenure as Secretary of the Treasury. By the middle of the twentieth century, other Hanna descendants owned additional quail plantations around Thomasville.

Yet the Hannas were not the only Clevelanders who wintered in and bought land in Thomasville. Another was Jeptha Homer Wade II, grandson of Western Union Telegraph founder Jeptha Homer Wade and an early benefactor of the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1903, Wade began assembling parcels for his own winter retreat south of Thomasville, eventually controlling over 10,000 acres. In 1905, he commissioned Cleveland architects Hubbell and Benes, the same firm that had designed Cleveland’s Wade Memorial Chapel, to design Millpond—a Spanish Revival mansion that featured a glass atrium flanked by a loggia. For Millpond’s gardens, Wade retained Frederick Law Olmsted’s apprentice Warren H. Manning, who also designed the grounds at the Vanderbilts’ Biltmore House in North Carolina, the Seiberlings’ Stan Hywet Hall in Akron, the Mathers’ Gwinn in Bratenahl, and Wade's Valley Ridge Farm in Hunting Valley.

Wade and his wife Ellen wintered at Millpond until her death in 1917 and his nine years later after which Millpond was placed in a trust for their children, Jeptha Homer Wade Jr., George Garretson Wade, and Helen W. Wade (Mrs. Edward B. Greene). Helen inherited her brothers’ interests, and when she passed away in 1958, her daughter Helen Wade Garretson Perry owned Millpond for nearly forty more years. Thereafter, the home continued to be owned by descendants of Wade.

The Hannas and Wades, like other Cleveland industrialists and their counterparts in other northern cities, took former cotton plantations once worked by enslaved or sharecropping Black workers and reimagined them as winter retreats, albeit still depending on Black labor. They retained the term “Plantation” in their names but repurposed the land for hunting quail. Ironically, it was the longstanding practice of burning fields and forests before each next cotton-planting cycle that had created a setting conducive to quail plantations. In their desire to maintain this quality, winter residents came to embrace conservation practices such as those advanced by forester and ornithologist Herbert Stoddard, who penned an influential book on quail conservation in 1931.

Though they learned to embrace forest conservation and wildlife management, quail plantation owners could not overcome wider environmental changes after World War II, including habitat loss amid conversion of farms to exotic grasses or short-rotation pine plantations, pesticide use, and suburban sprawl. By the end of the century, the quail “harvest” plummeted by more than 75 percent. Today, family-owned quail plantations like Wade’s Millpond and conservation organizations are working to restore quail populations. Meanwhile, historic sites such as Hanna’s Pebble Hill and South Eden (formerly Melrose and Sinkola) offer visitors a glimpse of the leisured lifestyles that Cleveland-based manufacturing wealth permitted in Thomasville.

Images

Pebble Hill Plantation
Pebble Hill Plantation After the antebellum home on Kate Benedict Hanna Harvey’s estate burned down in 1934, she hired Abram Garfield, a prominent Cleveland architect (and the grandson of President James A. Garfield) to design a more fireproof masonry house. The house’s front facade was rendered in the Greek Revival style so popular in the South, while the rear was modeled on the Federal style that was more common in the North, a seemingly fitting symbol of northerners’ embrace of southern living after Reconstruction. Source: Wikimedia Commons Creator: Judson McCranie, CC BY-SA 3.0 Date: October 16, 2019
Piney Woods Hotel
Piney Woods Hotel Along with the Mitchell House, Piney Woods Hotel was one of the two leading accommodations for wealthy tourists from the North in the 1880s and 1890s. Many northerners began visiting Thomasville after Reconstruction, and some of them, including the Hanna family, returned to invest in many thousands of acres of land to establish private retreats where they enjoyed breeding and riding horses and especially hunting bobwhite quail, doves, and ducks. Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Creator: Joseph John Kirkbride Date: ca. 1890
Howard Melville Hanna Sr.
Howard Melville Hanna Sr. Howard Melville Hanna, who often went by the nickname Mel, made a fortune from several industries in Cleveland that enabled him to retire at age 45. He and his older brother Marcus Alonzo Hanna began visiting Thomasville, Georgia, in the 1880s with their families. In the 1890s, Mel Hanna began amassing former cotton plantations and turning them into quail plantations. The best known of these was Pebble Hill, which is now a house museum. Source: Cleveland Public Library, Photograph Collection Creator: George Mountain Edmondson Date: 1907
Howard Melville Hanna Jr.
Howard Melville Hanna Jr. Howard Melville Hanna Jr. worked his way up through the ranks of the M. A. Hanna Company, eventually serving as its president and then chairman of the board. Hanna Jr. married his first cousin Jean Claire Hanna in 1907 in Thomasville because Ohio law prohibited marrying one's first cousin. After his father's death in 1921, he inherited Melrose Plantation, which were deeded to his daughters Fanny and Kate after he died in 1945. Source: Cleveland Public Library, Photograph Collection Creator: George Mountain Edmondson Date: 1913
Fanny Hanna
Fanny Hanna Fanny Hanna, born in 1907, was the first daughter of Howard Melville Hanna Jr. and Jean Claire Hanna. This photo of her on horseback was probably taken in the Cleveland area when she was eight years old. Fanny married Julian Castle Bolton, the grandson of Cleveland mayor William Castle, son of M. A. Hanna Co. partner Charles Chester Bolton and brother of Ohio senator Chester Castle Bolton, whose wife Frances Payne Bolton finished out his term after his death. Fanny Hanna Bolton and her sister Kate Benedict Hanna Bicknell inherited Melrose Plantation from their father in 1945 and divided it into two separate estates eight years later. Source: Cleveland Public Library, Photograph Collection Creator: George Mountain Edmondson Date: 1915
Pebble Hill Rear Facade
Pebble Hill Rear Facade Source: Wikimedia Commons Creator: Judson McCranie, CC BY-SA 3.0 Date: October 16, 2019
Enclosed Loggia on Rear of Pebble Hill
Enclosed Loggia on Rear of Pebble Hill Source: Wikimedia Commons Creator: Judson McCranie, CC BY-SA 3.0 Date: October 16, 2019
Robert Livingston Ireland Jr. at Foshalee Plantation
Robert Livingston Ireland Jr. at Foshalee Plantation Ireland (1895-1981) was the son of Robert Livingston Ireland and Kate Benedict Hanna Ireland. He and fellow Cleveland David S. Ingalls bought Ring Oak and Foshalee Plantations in the 1950s. The latter was one of the plantations that Kate's father Mel Hanna Sr. had bought and later sold. He had risen to president of Hanna Coal Co. by 1931 and then served as an executive and eventually vice-chairman of the board after it merged into a Pittsburgh-based coal company. Source: State Library and Archives of Florida Creator: Richard Parks Date: December 1969
Hanna Estates in Bratenahl
Hanna Estates in Bratenahl Howard Melville Hanna Jr., Gertrude Mary Hanna Haskell, and Kate Hanna Ireland lived in adjacent lakefront homes in Bratenahl in the warmer months and on the adjacent Melrose, Winnstead, and Pebble Hill plantations near Thomasville in wintertime. Source: Plat Book of the City of Cleveland, Ohio, Vol. I (Hopkins, 1912), Cleveland Public Library, Map Collection Date: 1912
Jeptha Homer Wade II
Jeptha Homer Wade II Jeptha Homer Wade II, grandson of his namesake founder of Western Union Telegraph, directed his philanthropic energies into both Cleveland and Thomasville, where he owned Millpond Plantation. Source: A History of Cleveland and Its Environs, Vol. II, via Wikimedia Commons Date: 1918
Millpond from Driveway
Millpond from Driveway Jeptha H. Wade II's winter home, Millpond, was a Spanish Revival house designed for him by the Cleveland architectural firm Hubbell & Benes, which had designed Wade Memorial Chapel (1901), his tribute to his grandfather in Lake View Cemetery. Hubbell & Benes went on to design other prominent Cleveland buildings, notably West Side Market (1912) and the Cleveland Museum of Art (1916). The house was completed in 1905. Source: Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Gardens Creator: J. E. Robinson & Co. Date: ca. 1920s
Millpond, Northeast Corner
Millpond, Northeast Corner Millpond's grounds were designed by Warren H. Manning of Boston, who had gotten his professional start under Frederick Law Olmsted and had famously laid out the grounds of the Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina. Manning later designed the grounds of Stan Hywet Hall in Akron, Gwinn in Bratenahl, and Wade's own Valley Ridge Farm in Hunting Valley. At Millpond, Manning designed formal garden "rooms" with boxwood hedges, camellias, roses, and other ornamental shrubs, and pebble paths. Source: Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Gardens Creator: J. E. Robinson & Co. Date: ca. 1920s
Millpond Atrium Interior
Millpond Atrium Interior Millpond was unusual not only because it bucked the pattern of employing the Classical Revival style for both older antebellum plantation homes and newer hunting retreat homes in Thomasville, but also because of its central feature—a pyramidal atrium with retractable glass panels that enabled a combination of indoor and open-air gardening inside. The low-slung tile-roofed mansion's rooms surrounded this atrium. Despite Millpond's low profile, it contains 38,000 square feet of space, including the atrium. Source: Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Gardens Creator: J. E. Robinson & Co. Date: ca. 1920s
Greenwood Plantation
Greenwood Plantation The Greek Revival–style Greenwood Plantation, designed by English architect John Wind, was originally built in 1839 for planter Thomas Jones. In 1899, Clevelander Oliver Hazard Payne bought Greenwood. Like Howard Melville Hanna Sr., Payne was in the oil refining business and sold out to John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, in this case in 1872. Payne, who was Frances Payne Bolton’s uncle, hired Stanford White of the renowned architectural firm McKim, Mead & White to design an expansion of the original house. He lived at Greenwood until 1916, when he deeded it to his nephew Payne Whitney. It remained in the family until 2016, when it was sold to Emily Vanderbilt Wade, the widow of Jeptha Homer Wade III, who was Millpond Plantation owner Jeptha Homer Wade II’s grandson. Source: Jay V. Hare Lantern Slide Collection, Pennsylvania Horticultural Society Date: ca. 1930
Bobwhite Quail
Bobwhite Quail The Northern Bobwhite, or Virginia Quail, has an extensive native range from southern Ontario to southern Mexico and from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains. By the late 19th century, quail hunting for sport became a widespread activity in many states, including Georgia. The longleaf and loblolly pine forests of southwestern Georgia became especially prominent as hunting grounds as a result of Thomasville's reputation as a leading winter resort before Florida coastal resorts eclipsed it. In 1970, the Georgia General Assembly designated the Northern Bobwhite as the official game bird of Georgia. However, in Georgia and throughout its range, the quail's populations have dropped by more than 75 percent since that time as a result of multiple factors ranging from overhunting to habitat loss from land-use changes and pesticide use. Source: Wikimedia Commons Creator: Louis Agassiz Fuertes Date: ca. 1910s
Herbert Stoddard
Herbert Stoddard In the 1920s, Stoddard went to work at the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, a precursor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where he studies northern bobwhite quail in the Red Hills region of Georgia and Florida. He wanted to understand the gradual decline of the bird population in the area, and his work resulted in the realization that controlled burning was a necessity for conserving quail. He published his findings in a 1931 book titled The Bobwhite Quail: Its Habitats, Preservation, and Increase. Quail plantation owners learned to adopt the methods of conservation that would extend their enjoyment of hunting on the lands they had acquired, but in later years other environmental changes presented new challenges. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Quail Hunting
Quail Hunting This view shows hunters and their attendants, horses, and dogs on the Sunny Hill Plantation in Leon County, Florida, immediately south of Thomas County, Georgia. This plantation was in the vicinity of Hanna’s Foshalee Plantation. Quail hunting typically occurs from November to February (hence its association with winter tourism in Thomasville) and often makes use of English setters or other hunting dogs to locate the birds for hunters to flush out and shoot. Source: Toni Frissell Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Creator: Toni Frissell Date: December 1968

Location

1251 US 319, Thomasville, GA 31792

Metadata

J. Mark Souther, “Thomasville Quail Plantations,” Cleveland Historical, accessed June 8, 2025, https://clevelandhistorical.org/index.php/items/show/1054.