Guest accommodations take the form of charming cottages that collectively comprise an Englishinspired village.
A GEORGIA PEACH Barnsley Resort Written by Caylee Matthews It is easy to be enamored with old buildings. Their time-worn walls are stalwart keepers of secrets; a repository for thousands of stories lost in time. An astute observer may be able to elicit a few clues that whisper of the past and then conjecture the details. If ever walls could talk, those that remain in the ruins of Woodlands–a once stately manor built in the late 1840s by Godfrey Barnsley for his wife Julia a few miles from the rural town of Adairsville in northwest Georgia–would spin an epic tale. Hauntingly handsome in its current state of halted decay, and surrounded by gloriously maintained gardens as the centerpiece of 3,000-acre Barnsley Resort, the Italianate manor has borne witness to fortune and famine, love and loss, pain and perseverance, and even the murder of a Barnsley heir at the hand of his brother. While Barnsley Manor may be the resort’s raison d'être, Clent Coker is arguably the estate’s greatest champion. A history buff and life-long admirer of the property, his tenacity and unwavering commitment to saving the home, along with its antebellum gardens and the stories of those who lived and died there, most certainly kept it from becoming a footnote 40 slmag.net
in the annals of history. “If I had a nickel for every hour I’ve put into Barnsley, I could travel the world,” Coker remarked during a candlelit dinner in the ruins as part of my visit. Coker had a hand in convincing Prince Hubertus Fugger of Bavaria to acquire the property in the late 1980s, and worked closely with him to commence an ambitious plan to stabilize the ruins and revive and expand the gardens, which are now one of the few surviving antebellum gardens in the South. A little more than a decade later, Fugger opened Barnsley Resort, with guest accommodations taking the form of charming cottages that collectively comprise an English-inspired village influenced by the work of Andrew Jackson Downing (18151852). Downing, considered to be the founder of American landscape architecture, was also a prominent advocate of the Gothic Revival style in the United States. To this, Fugger added a Jim Fazio-designed 18-hole golf course, a spa, regionallyinspired fine dining at The Woodlands Grill and Rice House, and a host of outdoor activities, including horseback riding, sporting clays and hiking.
