In late 1909 and early 1910 Asa Candler, Jr., faced the first public drama of his career when an incident at the Atlanta Speedway resulted in a squabble among the track’s administrative officers. After weeks of his name appearing in print as unflattering (and very likely true) claims were levied against him, he sought to escape the pressures of cut-throat business and start life anew anywhere but Atlanta. It was a move that made sense to him, having moved around and started over several times in his life already.

On December 12, 1909 the Atlanta Journal reported on the number of lots in Druid Hills that had sold so far, and noted that Asa Candler, Jr., intended to build “palace.” worth $100,000. Then, on February 9, 1910, the Atlanta Georgian ran a story titled “Railway Company May Take Charge of the Speedway” followed by three sub-headlines, one of which read, “Candler may live in New York in Future.” In the article an unnamed informant provided the following quote:

Price reference: according to “Inman Park” by Christine V. Marr and Sharon Foster Jones, Asa Sr.’s first mansion, Callan Castle, which he occupied during this time period, was built at a cost of $13k in 1903. By contrast, according to “Historic Dekalb County: An Illustrated History” by Vivian Price, Asa, Sr.’s 1916 mansion known as the Lemon Pie House was built at a cost of $210k. In the Atlanta Journal report, fellow wealthy Atlantan and real estate investor Forrest Adair planned to build a home for $30k. So this gives some idea of the price scaling. Click here to read more about Callan Castle and the Lemon Pie House on my author blog.

Given that Buddie was indeed shopping for property in his father’s land investment known as Druid Hills, and given that family lore later claimed his inheritance in 1916 was reduced by his outstanding debt to his father in the amount of $100k, this quote may have been accurate. He was a bragger by nature, always one to boast about what he’d done—even misrepresenting documentable facts if necessary—and about what he would do in the future. So it would not have been out of character to spread the story that he was a big man with big plans to build himself a mansion of palatial proportions.

What this establishes is that Briarcliff Mansion was a dream that took 12 years to come to fruition.

In 1911 Buddie was strapped for cash as the Speedway went belly up. Asa, Sr., foreclosed on the property’s mortgage, and public perception of Buddie as a businessman had bottomed out. His plan to purchase the land that would eventually become Briarcliff was underway, but he hadn’t quite gotten over the financial threshold to finalize the purchase. Then a fire broke out in his garage at his Inman Park home, destroying heavily insured cars and the structure in which they were housed. He closed on the new property soon after.

But there was no $100k mansion to move into in 1912. Instead, he moved his family, now consisting of wife Helen, and children Lucy III, John, Laura, Martha, and Helen, Jr, to the existing farmhouse on the working chicken ranch that they now owned. Once there, he retreated from the unflattering limelight of track ownership, briefly dabbled in athletics investment, and got a fresh start as a farmer. First he bred chickens and sent them around to various competitions, showing his Orpingtons and vying for best in show, but it didn’t take long for him to abandon that interest and graduate to something bigger. He started a dairy and called it Briarcliff Farm. More about the origin story of the name Briarcliff will appear in a future site update.

The property he purchased had one major natural asset that he used to his advantage, and once aware of it you’ll see how it fits into every scheme that he put into action there: Briarcliff’s artesian well. His land had a significant high pressure spring that issued an endless bounty of water. In fact, by one account the well put forth a flow rate of 5,000 gallons of water per minute. His first use for the well was his cattle barns.

True to his nature, he went big and made impressive claims to prop up the perception of his excellence in business matters.

Green corn silage was trucked in, cut with a 15-hp. motor-driven cutter and blown through a conveyor into the top of a 40-ft. silo, an expensive setup but claimed to be well worth the cost, given the savings on manual labor. More about the functionality of the automatic water fountains below. Note the liberal distribution of superlative praise.

Fortunately for his business plans, US involvement in WWI ramped up in 1914, and the nearby army base south of Atlanta known as Fort McPherson was put to use as a training ground for fresh recruits. He sold the output of his dairy to the military and hotels around the city, and did well recouping the cost of the expensive operation. But in 1918 the war ended and the doughboys stopped coming. Given the high overhead of production, financial troubles loomed right away. Buddie had to pivot and determine how to make up the sales gap now that the military was no longer buying. He made an effort to sell direct to consumers but he couldn’t move product in sufficient volume to keep the huge endeavor going.

But let’s rewind two years to 1916. In that year, Asa Candler, Sr., was elected mayor of Atlanta. In order to divest himself of his interests, or at least create the appearance of doing so, he gifted Coca Cola to his five children and gave them their inheritances early. Lucy Elizabeth was ill with cancer by this point, and the outlook wasn’t good. It’s believed that she may have been behind the idea to issue the inheritances while she was still alive. Family lore says Buddie got the smallest of the five shares, because their shrewd father deducted any outstanding debts from his children’s totals. As previously stated, that lore claims Buddie’s debt was $100k. Plausible, given how far into the red the Speedway went before it closed down.

Howard was given his full inheritance, as well as the presidency of Coca Cola. Flush with cash, he was free to start planning for his mansion, Callanwolde, and broke ground in 1917. Buddie was not quite so liquid. In 1919 the siblings agreed that they wanted to sell out of Coca Cola, freeing them from the untenable arrangement that had them collaborating in the decisions to run the company. They wanted out of the obligation, and they wanted their money. So they closed the deal and each took a cool $25mm from the transaction. Asa, Jr., and his brother Walter also sold 300 acres of Camp Gordon land to the government for $50k.

But even though he finally had the funding, Buddie didn’t break ground on his mansion right away. First he had to clear the land. In July of 1920 he sold off his whole herd of Holsteins to make room. His prize sire, Superba Lord Ragapple, went for a whopping $1500. In all he sold 162 head of cattle for top dollar. Then he hired master architect Charles E. Frazier, moved his family to what is now 901 Oakdale Rd. N.E. in Druid Hills, and construction crews started preparing the landscape to break ground.

Even though he’d spared no expense in the construction plans, he didn’t live small while the mansion was coming together. As was the style of the time, he bought a luxury yacht. Named Helasa, a portmanteau of Helen and Asa, he pursued a newly discovered passion for the open waters, especially the ones between Florida and Cuba.

In 1921 he made unflattering headlines again in a bid for more money. He caused a dust-up among the new Coca Cola owners by claiming that they had created a stockholder voting block and delayed payout of his dividends. He needed those dividends. He was living large and wanted to continue his lifestyle as construction expenses grew. Details came out in the court filing that proved that three of the new owners were voting other holders’ stocks instead of letting the holders vote. But the vote issue wasn’t really what troubled Buddie. It was the money. The company hadn’t paid out dividends for preferred stock at 7% for at least six months. As the holder of 12,000 shares of preferred stock, the payout would have been significant. Instead, there he was in 1921, trying to live the lifestyle of the rich and carefree, waiting for his court case to make its way up all the way to the state Supreme Court so he could get paid.

The case put more strain on the ever-strained relationship with his brother, Howard, who was still president of Coca Cola. Howard was forced to make public statements about the accusations, distancing himself and the company from Buddie’s actions. In a family whose motto was “faithful until death,” he would not and could not stand by his brother. Given what is known about his lifelong conflict with Asa, Jr., the following quote is quite telling.

Some speculated that the filing was an effort to wrest back control of the company from the new owners, but that seems unlikely. He didn’t want to run Coca Cola. Years prior he had agreed to give up all input into Coca Cola if they would grant him full oversight of the Candler Investment Co.’s real estate portfolio. No, this case was solely about money when Briarcliff’s construction was at its peak. The filing hit the papers on July 7, 1921 and the announcement of the resolution was published on February 4, 1922. Another telling quote from Howard appeared in print.

Given Buddie’s financial pressures and the underlying reason he both pursued and dropped the charges, it seems unlikely that Howard’s statement was a fabrication. It is also apparent from the quote speculating about his brother’s thought process that he and Buddie may not have been on speaking terms at that point.

If you look at what was going on in Buddie’s life you see where the pressure was coming from. He’d broken ground on Briarcliff with plans to invest in the highest quality materials and craftsmanship. Howard had already beaten him to the punch and finished Callanwolde, making it the finest showpiece of the Candler family homes. He was playing catch-up and trying to move quickly, and as he demonstrated in other episodes of his life, he was willing to spend more if it bought him speed to market.

While the mansion’s interior was underway, he poured resources into the visible parts, because of course it mattered what the public saw. Rather than prioritizing the structure and finishing the landscaping later, he prioritized the grounds. He had already opened his family pool for socializing in 1921, and in August of that year he invited the Atlanta Constitution to do a photo-tour of the property. The florid headline declared, “Forty Acres of Fairyland.”

It’s important to note the timing of this gushing, superlative review of his new home. It’s one of several incidents in his life when bad press was followed by the highest imaginable praise in the form of paid puffery, like shouting to drown out criticism. Sometimes, if he couldn’t get a staff writer to feature his good side, he would dictate it himself. Inevitably when you find an apropos-of-nothing positive story about Asa Candler, Jr., you can trace back and find an unflattering drama in the preceding month or two. This was 1921’s puff piece following the lawsuit against Coca Cola.

On October 20, 1921, an outdated announcement in the “dwellings” section of The Manufactures Record reported the following, which included incorrect location information:

In 1922 the house was finally complete. While it underwent several revisions throughout its life, ultimately, Briarcliff included 22 rooms of richly carved wood paneling, coffered ceilings, marble fireplaces, two solariums, seven bedrooms with a balcony overlooking the music hall in the master suite, and a ballroom with 14-foot ceilings and gold-leafed walls that housed what was once the largest private magic collection in the world, among other features.

Over the years the grounds evolved, and included the mansion, servant quarters, tennis courts, a golf course, a mini-farm that grew vegetables and raised pigs for slaughter, stables, greenhouses, a private pool, a public pool, and a short-lived zoo. The application for the National Register of Historic Places is a valuable source for insights into the interiors and layout. Reading through the document, it quickly becomes clear that every detail was designed to impress.

Even though much of what is noted above existed at its grand opening, it wasn’t enough. Buddie didn’t know the meaning of the word enough. In January 1923 his oldest daughter, Lucy-Three, was ready for her debut. To celebrate, he and Helen recreated a Japanese garden in the middle of winter by filling the house to overflowing with exotic flowers in what the Atlanta Constitution described as “one of the most elaborate and beautiful social affairs ever given in Atlanta.”

Then in June of 1923 he felt obligated to top himself. The property was subjected to its first revision when Lucy-Three accepted an engagement proposal from a young man named Homer Thompson. Buddie decided to outdo her debut and built a second solarium off of the side of the porte-cochère to house some of the festivities. In 1925 he and Helen added a music hall in honor of his recent purchase of an Aeolian pipe organ, largest in Georgia and eighth largest ever built. His father had an Aeolian in his house on Ponce de Leon Ave., and his brother Howard had an even larger Aeolian in his home at Callanwolde. Buddie topped them both. He brought back architect C. E. Frazier and his partner Daniel Bodin to design the music room, tacking it onto the north end of the main house, adapting windows into doorways and creating a balcony off of the master bedroom to serve as a private opera box for the lord and lady of the manor.

A guest dining room was also added at that point, a 75-seat formal entertaining space that was served by a commercial-sized kitchen. Over the following decades the Candlers played host to innumerable dinner parties for various civic organizations. They also broadcast organ performances on the fledgling radio station WSB. After Helen Candler passed away in 1927 and Buddie remarried nine months later, he took a brief break from socializing to travel by sea from Hawaii to Asia and back. When he and his new wife Florence returned, their social calendar picked up right where it had left off.

In the mid- to late-1920s Buddie discovered a love of magic and flying, and started traveling to New York regularly to buy magical apparatuses. He put his third floor ballroom to good use as a storage and display room for his collection and started hosting magic parties with other wealthy enthusiasts and celebrity magicians. When his passion for the hobby waned in 1931, he embarked on his next property revision. It started with an elephant.

His first elephant, Coca, was permitted to roam the back property, eating the underbrush and clearing land. Then he acquired a bear, a former school mascot that needed a new home. And once you buy an elephant and a bear, naturally you buy the rest of the menagerie. Which he did. An anecdotal story claims he purchased a defunct circus in Germany while drunk. As the story goes, he telegraphed home to his architects, Frazier and Bodin, to tell them that he bought a zoo and to proceed with building cages. Another anecdotal story claims Frazier and Bodin were not given advance notice, and construction on enclosures only began after the animals arrived. Both stories have changed hands so many times with no attribution that they’re impossible to verify. The first version reeks of Buddie’s own flare for autobiographical exaggeration, but may indeed be true. What can be verified is that he completed the transaction through an exotic animal handler in New Hampshire and brought them in by train. More about the zoo will be included in a future site update.

The northeast corner of the property was leveled and cleared for cages and picnic areas. This included a large concrete structure that contained a series of enclosures for some of the carnivores. He had large cages to contain flocks of exotic birds, and later he added to his collection by digging out a water feature and adding a sea lion exhibit.

Remember, Buddie had that artesian well to make use of. It gave him a bountiful supply for his animals with enough left over for sea creatures to cavort in the sun. However, water ended up being a source of complaint from the neighbors, whose concerns over odors and disease due to runoff and standing wastewater made the papers nationwide.

He tapped his well for other purposes, too, including the addition of a vast public pool, which featured a NovaLux floodlight projection fountain, a concession stand, and an admission price of 25 cents per person.

Note: most accounts incorrectly cite neon as the fountain’s light source, which would have been out of keeping with the application of neon lights at the time. Additionally, a similarly structured tiered fountain at West View Cemetery is confirmed as a NovaLux floodlight projection model featuring the same colored light effects as observed at Briarcliff. Buddie mirrored some decisions between Briarcliff and West View during the 30s and 40s, strengthening the evidence that the fountain in both locations would have likely been similar types. As seen in this waymarking site (click here to view), NovaLux fountains may look as though they once featured neon tubes and could be mistaken for neon fixtures. The one in the above link is a 1930s GE Novalux 15 projector model, the same model that Buddie installed at Westview.

Other uses for his well included his exotic plants collection in his greenhouses, his nine-hole golf course, his laundry service, and on May 23, 1943, the Atlanta Constitution ran a curious op-ed that referenced Briarcliff’s fish hatchery. Presumably an unsuccessful venture, given that this is the only reference to that endeavor found to date.

In 1926 he briefly took the helm as president of the Druid Hills Land Co. when his father was incapacitated by a stroke. Soon after Howard stepped in to take over, but during his time Asa, Jr., negotiated property lines around the Druid Hills Golf Club and established water access rights to the Druid Hills mains. Water rights were a particular interest of his, so it’s unsurprising that he oversaw that decision.

Back to the zoo era. After it shut down for good in 1935, Buddie laid low for a while. His focus shifted from his home property to his work at West View Cemetery, where his quasi-altruistic architectural aspirations found a new outlet. As the 1940s began he developed big plans to build out an enormous mausoleum, and a couple years later proposed a dedicated soldier’s chapel. But with America’s involvement in WWII ramping up, materials were expensive and cemetery revenue was insufficient to fund his ideas. He needed a new stream of income.

He tapped into his artesian well and built a vast laundry and cold storage facility on Briarcliff’s land. He ramped up capacity and advertising and by 1943 became the Southeast’s largest commercial laundering facility. The business was a means by which to bring in money for his work at Westview.

Customers who wished to drop off their clothes drove up the long driveway toward the big house and then veered south to the laundry complex near the southern edge. While no photos of the exterior of the laundry have been found to date, a photo of the interior and an aerial photo of the demolished facility are in the gallery below. The facility was positioned approximately where the nine-hole golf course may have originally stood.

In 1943 a fire broke out at the laundry and leveled the facility, destroying many customers’ belongings. After the business burned down and the subsequent lawsuit concluded, Buddie reassessed his situation. He hadn’t given up on his mausoleum passion project, but by his own admission could feel old age coming on. He sold off large real estate holdings, and in 1946 he appears to have started making preparations to sell Briarcliff. It took two years but in 1948 he accepted an offer from the state government, which intended to convert the mansion into a residence for nurses as part of a plan to build a $9mm hospital on the grounds. The hospital plan never manifested, and eventually it became a treatment facility for alcoholism.

The application for the National Register of Historic Places claims Buddie and Florence continued to live at Briarcliff until 1952. I have not been able to substantiate this. Published photos of the interior from 1949 (see below) show a fully furnished home, but the music hall shows signs of being at least partially packed up. Buddie auctioned off some personal items during that time period, including his magic collection and a jade jewel casket with an asking price of $1200.

When they departed, Buddie and Florence swapped one Briarcliff for another and moved down the road to a penthouse suite in the Briarcliff Hotel and Apartments on the corner of Ponce de Leon Ave. and North Highland Ave.

After their departure the government went to work revising the property. Over the years some of the decorative elements were covered up, such as ceilings and crown moldings, which were concealed by drop-ceilings. Larger rooms like the drawing room and living room were subdivided into smaller offices. The kitchen was converted into a clinic area, and the doorway that connected it to the former dining room was bricked up. To comply with construction standards the two wings were capped with stairwells to serve as fire escapes, which bricked up windows in the rooms at the end of each corridor. They made efforts to match the brick tone and texture but the additions are not seamless. They also added a modern walkway from the solarium wing to the second floor of the garage out back.

As time passed the property was subdivided, the family pool was filled in, the terraces were leveled, and concrete parking lots covered the formal garden and extended grounds. On the site of the former laundry a massive mental health hospital was erected, along with several small satellite homes for long-term hospital residents. Outbuildings were razed, the public pool was filled in and eventually the property was purchased by Emory University, becoming what is now known as the Briarcliff Campus. The former hospital building still stands and can be seen in the Netflix show “Stranger Things.” The mansion has been featured in many TV shows and movies, including “Vampire Diaries,” “First Man,” and the DC Universe’s “Doom Patrol.”

Emory University briefly considered a proposal to convert the property into a boutique hotel but announced in December of 2018 that the project would not proceed as planned. Although they did not offer an alternative plan, the university expressed an intention to continue work stabilizing the structure and protecting it for future use. Its popularity as a location for the film industry may save the property from what seemed at one point to be certain destruction. At one point showing signs of extensive deferred maintenance, water damage, and vandalism, the mansion received a new, modern asphalt tile roof in the fall of 2018 and the interiors appear to have been cleaned up significantly. Windows that were boarded up appear to have been repaired with glass.

While some historic preservationists have expressed concerns that the restoration work has not been undertaken with an intention to restore the home’s original features, citing the decision to re-roof with modern materials rather than matching the original tile, the alternative may have been a slow decline into structural disrepair that could not be salvaged. Or, perhaps, an “accidental” fire, as so often happens to protected properties on valuable lands with developer interest.

For now Briarcliff is tentatively safe from immediate danger from either demolition or decay. How long the stay of execution will last is impossible to say. Please visit the Save Briarcliff group on Facebook to get involved with preservation efforts.

Briarcliff Farm Gallery

Briarcliff Mansion Interior Gallery

Briarcliff Mansion Music Hall & Aeolian Organ Gallery

Briarcliff Mansion Exterior Gallery

Briarcliff Farm and Mansion Resources

• Electrical Review, Volume 73, December 28, 1918

• Atlanta City Directories

• The Georgia Frontier, Vol. 2

• National Register of Historic Places, Briarcliff Mansion

• Manufactures Record, October 20, 1921

• Save Briarcliff

• Amy Simone Photography

• NYBG, Lord and Burnham Archive

• Guide to the Gardens of Georgia, by Lilly Pinkas

• Atlanta and Environs: A Chronicle of Its People and Events, 1880s-1930s, by Franklin M. Garrett

• The Southerner Online

• Atlanta's Ponce de Leon Avenue: A History, by Sharon Foster Jones

• New Georgia Encyclopedia

• Girls, Gourds and Geckos: My Grandfather the Zookeeper