A sale in historic Mimosa Hall

Toward the end of September I saw an estate sale advertised.  It was a 3-day sale in a historic house in Roswell, Georgia.  When I realized that it was to take place in Mimosa Hall, I decided to go, just to see the house at least.  I had seen it from the street, but could not distinguish much of the house.  So this sale was a good opportunity to get a close look at the house and see more.

Roswell is a town about 15 miles (24 km) from our home and has many historic houses.  I have already mentioned Bulloch Hall which we visited at a couple of Christmas times and during their quilt shows in the spring (here is a link, and here another link on the quilts.)  Below are some pictures I took of Bulloch Hall then.

The City of Roswell purchased 3 historic homes - which they call "A Southern Trilogy."  They are the homes of three of the families who founded this town.

In addition to Bulloch Hall, we visited the exterior of Barrington Hall a couple of times, and I'll have posts on those visits.  You can see my husband, below, sitting on Barrington Hall porch last January while I was taking some pictures of the garden.

Last Friday, October 17, 2014, we visited the third antebellum house, the Archibald Smith Plantation.  I'll also have a post on it soon.

A fourth house, Mimosa Hall, was also built in the mid-1800s, but is now in private hands.  It is very close to Bulloch Hall and the Saturday of the sale, September 20, 2014, I parked in the street, just a few yards from Mimosa Hall, right in front of the gate of Bulloch Hall.  It was a very sunny and warm day but I did not see any visitors on its grounds.  It was also the annual Arts Festival on the Square in Roswell.

Since going to this sale I have found out that Mimosa Hall was built between 1839 and 1840 for John Dunwody (1786-1858) (also spelled Dunwoody) a coastal planter who had moved to Roswell from Liberty County, near Savannah, Ga.  The house was built adjacent to Bulloch Hall because John Dunwoody's wife was the sister of Major James. S. Bulloch.  The house, built of wood, burned down the night of its housewarming.  Another house made of brick covered with stucco and scored to resemble stone, was built on the same site and called Phoenix Hall.  Below is the house in 1940 and John Dunwody (courtesy Georgia Archives.)

During the Civil War the house was a hospital. In 1869 the house was sold to General Andrew J. Hansell and was renamed Mimosa Hall (because of a large number of mimosa trees on the estate.)  He sold it 30 years later but in 1947 Granger Hansell re-purchased the house for the family (he was the great-grandson of Andrew Hansell.)  Granger's son, Edward and his wife Sylvia, lived in the house until their deaths.  Their daughter Sally now owns the house.  I understood that Sally Hansen is re-decorating the house and was selling the furnishing of her father, Edward, who passed away in 2012.  It was not easy walking on the driveway which is paved with large rocks - larger than regular cobblestones.  The garden looked very inviting with its enormous century-old trees.

Entering the house, the foyer reminded me of Bulloch Hall.  I later found out that the two houses are very much alike.  I was surprised also to see that so few people were at the sale - I guess it was because of the Arts festival.  Another large event was going on also in a nearby church.

The sale had started on Friday and by Saturday, the day I went there, many of the items had been sold, but there were still many more - furniture, china, paintings, dishes, silverware, books, etc.  (Click on collage to enlarge.)

I looked more at the rooms in the house rather than what was for sale.  I could not stop going to the books though and did purchase one.  It is called "Born in Paradise" by Armine von Tempski, a first 1940 edition (for $2.)  It is the true story of the young Armine on Haleakala Ranch in Hawaii - a 60,000 acres ranch.  It describes the way the island of Maui was in the early 1900s before the real estate boom and strip malls.  I think it will be a good book to read during the cold of winter.

Upstairs was a room filled with clothes and shoes.  I did not go in.  The other room had what was left of a doll house, toys, linens, more clothes and hats.  A lovely chandelier was hanging in the hall, but I don't think it was for sale.

Then I walked up to the attic.  Just as the attic in Bulloch Hall, it was rather large.  It was filled with a great variety of items, old, quaint, cute, shabby, broken and almost new.

Walking back downstairs I stopped on several steps to look at three lovely paintings.

The late Sylvia Hansell was an an accomplished artist.  Her paintings hang in some regional art galleries and in private collections.  In addition to the stairwell her paintings were being offered for sale throughout Mimosa Hall.

As I was ready to leave one of the sales associates announced that there was now a 25% discount on all items.  In addition to the book I had already selected there were two other objects I liked - a lamp in the attic, with a long and narrow unusual lampshade and one of Ms. Hansell's paintings.  I was told she painted it in the Mimosa Hall gardens.  The colors were soft and bright at the same time, in hues of lilac, purple and blue.  So I left with my three purchases.  I was also very pleased to have had the chance to visit this historic home.

UPDATE !
June 18, 2016 - I just found out that Mimosa Hall, the family home of the Hansell family for six generations, has been placed on the market.  It is listed at $3,850.000 with 4 bedrooms, 3 1/2 baths, a double parlor, 6,308 interior square feet, 10 fireplaces, and heart-of-pine floors throughout.  A swimming pool, a barn and century old trees are included in the 9 acres of beautiful gardens.

When I read that 21 acres of adjoining woods are also for sale it scared me.  I just hope developers are not going to turn Mimosa Hall and Bulloch Hall into the center of new condominiums.  Selling lots around these historic homes to build gaudy, fake castles or ugly ego-busting McMansions would be a disaster for elegant Roswell (apart from the $ obtained ...) - let's hope not!

Yesterday, June 17, 2016, I published a post and at the end of it I and explained the differences between the commonly known mimosa tree in the Southern US states and the mimosa tree in the Provence area of France, with pictures.  Please click here to read it.

Hawaii - Plantations and Usurpation

Green. We were in the interior of O’ahu, Hawaii, in February and everything around us was green: trees, grass, fields - apart from the colors from flowers or trees, like the orange flowers of the African tulip tree (Spathodea campanulata) and the soil which is as red as in Georgia. We saw beautiful shades of green - far indeed from the snow in the USA.



About 40 minutes from Honolulu driving down the Kamehameha Highway we went by large pineapple fields.



Then we arrived at the Dole Plantation. It is a large complex, set up mostly for tourists where a supersized gift store welcomes you. There are no free samples and everything is overpriced.

Click on collage to enlarge then click on each picture to biggify

There is also a garden maize, a little touring train, gardens and a restaurant. Various admission prices apply. We were told the plantation now only produces “boutique” pineapples, whatever that means since “une boutique” is the French word for “a shop.” Their crops also include coffee and chocolate.

I bought some postcards and mints. I also bought a tiny package of chocolate, the size of my index finger (priced at $6.) I was tempted by a jar of guava preserve but I cannot show you its picture as it was confiscated at the Los Angeles airport.



It started to rain so we left. This would be my shortest post if it were not for my usual habit of researching more about my subjects. In this case I thought I would read about the Dole Company. Well, I have been at it for a week now and it is fascinating. This reading opened a door on the history of Hawai’i as the Doles were connected with it from the beginning of the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom. I have learnt a lot about Hawai’i that surprised me and also about the USA - most of it painful. Growing up in France we had so much to study with French history, then the history of the rest of Europe that we barely studied the United States – the French and Indian wars, the War of Independence helped by the French, the Civil War and that’s about it.

US Empire, circa 1900

We never learnt about the US “empire” as such (this is what it is called) and establishment of US colonies like Hawaii, Guam, The US Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa and Puerto Rico (Liberia, Cuba and the Philippines were given back.) I also did not know that Hawaii had its freedom curtailed unlawfully, that a silent coup deposed the queen (and imprisoned her in her own home.) Hawai'i was forcibly annexed and illegally made to become part of the Union (without native Hawaiian input).

The islands of Hawai’i being in the middle of the Pacific were isolated for centuries. They had a rich and successful culture. When in 1778 Captain James Cook arrived into Kauai he brought with him many diseases which almost wiped out the population. Then from 1820 to 1840 came 200 devout Christian missionaries ready to convert the heathen Hawaiians. This they did – not always for the good of the natives. They destroyed their native culture and forced them to deny all aspects of their heritage, because they said it was evil. The Hawaiians were forced to embrace the “superior” Christian Puritan American culture. Many Hawaiians died. Missionary Hiram Bigham (1789-1869) described them as “almost naked savages, whose heads and feet and much of their sunburnt swarthy skins are bare and appalling” and called them “stupid.” Even though he came from a nation enjoying separation of Church and State and the Bill of Rights, he proclaimed the 10 Commandments the code of laws.

Portrait of Hawaiian woman circa 1900 (courtesy of the Hawai'i State Archives)

Another missionary, Dr Gerrit Parmele Judd (1803–1873,) refused to have doctors inoculate the Hawaiians with an effective smallpox vaccine, instead forcing a cheaper alternative. As a result 5,947 died but Dr. Judd saved $60. The missionaries and their children started to buy land – for almost nothing (these were really land grabs.) This was followed by usurpation of political power. While in Hawaii the writer Herman Melville (best known for his work Moby Dick) railed against the Protestant missionaries who could have helped eliminate poverty, disease, starvation and death but instead preached moral values on Sunday and then acquired native land the rest of the week. Since he had sympathy for the Hawaiians, literary reviewers of the time advised their readers not to read his work.

Herman Melville (1819-1891), courtesy Wikipedia

Descendants of these missionary families still own large amounts of land in Hawaii. One of the missionary families was the Daniel Dole family. Their son, Sanford Dole (1844-1926), was instrumental in the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. It ended the Native Hawaiian sovereignty through unconstitutional means. Sanford Dole appointed himself, with the help of a little group of American Missionary/businessmen, the first president of the forcibly imposed Republic of Hawaii from 1894 till 1900, then governor until 1903. This coup makes for interesting reading and I am still reading on it. I have ordered some books on the subject and will talk more about this in a future post.

Sanford Dole (1844-1926)

Several years later Sanford Dole helped his pastor/cousin’s son, James Drummond Dole (1877-1958), to acquire land and begin his pineapple company. Since the arrival of the earlier foreign traders and missionary/businessmen, the native Hawaiian population had gone down from over 500,000 to less than 60,000 so the planters imported underpaid and sometimes unpaid labor in the form of foreign workers.

The fruit and sugar plantations actively recruited Japanese immigrants sending agents to sign long-term contracts. They also recruited Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Portuguese and African Americans.



In many plantations on the islands they worked long hours from dawn to dusk in hot, dusty fields and lived in communal barracks. European-American overseers enforced company rule with harsh fines and whipping.



In 1907, James Dole, known as the Pineapple King, created a cannery near the Honolulu harbor. In operation until 1991 this cannery was one of the world’s largest. I also found out that actress Bette Midler, born in Honolulu, was an employee in the cannery for a time.

Bette Midler, born in Honolulu in 1945

Dole was a savvy entrepreneur. He developed the first nationwide consumer ad campaign in the United States. Demand for Hawaiian pineapple grew even more. In 1925 he sponsored a recipe contest which drew 60,000 entries. The winning recipe was the pineapple upside-down cake.

His company used a new advertising concept by publishing recipes in the popular “ladies’ magazines.”




Demand increased his production to a million cases of pineapple a year and made his company, called then the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, a world leader. As demand grew for pineapple, more land was required. In 1922 Dole bought the Hawaiian Island of Lana’i. It became the largest pineapple plantation in the world with thousands of workers and their families. It supplied 75% of the world pineapple for 70 years. In 1948 the company was renamed The Dole Pineapple Company.

James Drummond Dole (1877-1958)

Pineapple production on Lana'i ended in October 1992. Today, descendants from original missionaries, Castle and Cooke, own nearly the entire island of Lana’i - they are the real estate arm of Dole Pineapple. The children of the missionaries' families would ultimately make the greatest change in Hawai'i by “acquiring” the land and dispossessing the native Hawaiians. As we drove by large tracts of land we were told that one of the original families owns it – this was a 250,000 acre ranch with 50,000 head of cattle. The Dole Company is now a mega multinational corporation named Dole Food Company, Inc. , based in the US but operating around the globe.In 2007 its revenues amounted to $6.9 billion. It stopped production of pineapple in Hawaii in 2007 as it was not profitable enough. Now cheaper labor is found in Costa Rica and the Philippines although there have been some controversies about working conditions and pesticides.

Vintage postcard - Pineapples at Harvest Time - Hawaiian Islands

"The United States is “just” –[it is] a land of liberty. The people there are the friends - the great friends of the weak. Let us tell them - let us show them that as they love their country and would suffer much before giving it up, so do we love our country, our Hawai'i, and pray that they do not take it from us."

- Mrs. Emma Nawahi, Women's Hawaiian Patriotic League, 1897

Hawaiian woman circa 1900 (courtesy of the Hawai'i State Archives)

Hawaii –Inspiration and Meditation

In the morning we did not take the Pearl Harbor exit out of Honolulu leading to the historical sites but instead drove to the Ko’olau Mountain Range. This range is the western half of an original volcano that was destroyed in prehistoric times. It is 110,000 acres of beautiful forested slopes of unusual beauty where it rains abundantly. There were heavy clouds above as I mentioned in my last week‘s post on the North Shore of O’ahu.

Ko’olau Mountain Range - Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

It was not raining yet when we arrived at the Byodo-In Temple, which is located at the base of the Ko’olau Mountains in an area known as the Valley of the Temple Memorial Park. This Buddhist temple is in Kahalu'u on the windward side of O’ahu Island, near Kane'ohe. It is visited by worshippers from around the world. As I first glimpsed at this temple I almost forgot to take its picture as I was in awe of its beauty with the rugged cliffs rising as a background and the fog overhead.

The Byodo-In Temple, which means “Temple of Equaliy, not to discriminate” was established on the 7th of June, 1968, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the arrival of the first Japanese immigrants to Hawaii. American businessmen in the Kingdom of Hawai’i actively recruited Japanese immigrants to work on the sugarcane and pineapple plantations. The Japanese, as well as the Chinese, Filipino, Korean and Portuguese labored from early morning to late evening chopping and weeding sugar cane on vast plantations. The temple was built entirely without nails and is a replica of the 950-year old Byodoin Temple in Uji, Japan, on the southern outskirts of the ancient city of Kyoto.

Byodo-in Temple in Uji, Japan, built in 998 and used jointly by the Jodo Shi and Tendai sects (courtesy of Sir Hallo)

Past the entrance and crossing over the wooden bridge into the grounds is like entering another world – a world of peace and serenity. Close to the bridge is the Bell House or kanetsu-ki-do. It contains a five-foot, three-ton brass Peace Bell called bon-sho (sacred bell.) It was cast in Osaka, Japan, by permission of the government of Japan. I went ahead and with the wooden log called “shu-moku” I rang the bell strongly to hear its deep tone. It is said that the pealing of the bell will purify the mind of evil spirits and temptation and bless you with happiness, long life and luck. Bells are typically rung in most Asian Buddhist and Hindu cultures before entering a place of worship. This bell has a very deep lingering sound wave that brings a message of calm and tranquility inspiring meditation. On the top of the bell are little knobs so as to have the sound of the gong generated outwards – all the way to the local town of Kahalu’u.

Click on collage to enlarge then click on each picture to biggify

My husband had gone ahead to the temple and I followed him there. Walking on the path I passed the Meditation Pavilion.



Walking by the sound of trickling brooks and the meditation niches on the immaculately maintained grounds I understood why this is called a place of serenity, for private thoughts and inner peace.



I removed my shoes to enter the temple. I had a lump in my throat when I saw the tall statue of Amitabha Buddha. It is called the “Lotus” Buddha as he sits on a giant lotus flower. It was carved of wood by the famous Japanese sculptor, Masuzo Inui. Painted with black and gold lacquer then decorated with gold leaf it is the largest wooden Buddha carved outside of Japan in over 900 years – it is over 9 ft tall (3m.)



Alone in the temple I meditated a few moments then tried to light some incense. It started to rain and was windy outside so my match would not light the incense. I must have tried at least a dozen times or more but then I had the idea to place the incense in the sand next to the others and it finally lit. The hush of the place enveloped me as I placed my offering of incense in homage of equality for which the temple is named. It was mystical and peaceful there with no one around, just the sound of the rain.



Then I went back out into the Zen-style garden toward the koi pond.



A visitor was feeding the birds and the fish were waiting below.



It certainly was relaxing to look at the large reflecting pond stocked with hundreds of Japanese koi (carp.)



Black swans were silently swimming by.



As I approached the pond the koi would follow me thinking that I may feed them. I did not have any pellets and was already behind.



The Byodo-In Temple is a Hawaii landmark that is not visited very often as visitors prefer to go surfing on the North Shore or in Waikiki. It may be recognized by people who watch television as I understand it was used in shows including Hawaii 5-O, Magnum P.I and Lost (home of the Korean woman Sun’s father.) It was also in the movie Pearl Harbor.



I walked to the original Japanese tea house which has been converted into a gift shop where my husband was waiting for me and I bought some postcards.



The Byodo-In Temple is not an active temple but funeral and memorial services as well as weddings can be conducted there for Hawaiians or Japanese visitors. It is a non-denominational Buddhist temple welcoming people to meditate in its sanctuary. For a time the body of Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos was interred in a private mausoleum overlooking Byody-In Temple until it was moved back to the Philippines.



Byodo-In Temple in the shadow of the mist covered cliffs of the Ko’alau Mountain Range rising to the clouds is a fascinating place of endless beauty. We could have stayed there many hours, but it was time to go. We left for the North Shore.