As a 16-year-old volunteer at the Hay House, Aubrey Newby led visitors through the architectural marvel, telling them the tales of the various owners of this magnificent home.
Nearly three decades later when he returned last year as executive director of the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation’s mid-19th Century showplace, he knew some of its greatest stories had never been told — until now.
Hay House is compiling research from 170 years of history into a new “Untold Stories” exhibit funded by the Georgia Humanities Council. Eventually, it will be permanently housed in the old kitchen on the first floor, but the public will get the first look at this collection in the music room during the free Hay Day event Sunday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
“Hay House is known as a technological marvel with its gas lighting, and you have 24 fireplaces and three indoor bathrooms and hot and cold running water and all these things. But the reality is that life wouldn’t exist if you didn’t have people behind the scenes making all of those things work and come together,” Newby told The Macon Newsroom as life-size portraits of African Americans encircled him.
They are the men and women who toiled for four years to build the palatial home, spent decades taking care of the children and maintaining its exquisite treasures from across the globe.
“I thought it was very important that we begin telling the stories that are often untold in the house,” Newby said. “At any point in the history of the home, there are more people working in the house than there are actually living in the house.”
He gathered a team of historians featuring Middle Georgia Regional Library’s head of the genealogical and historical room at the regional archives, Muriel Jackson, Brenda Sutton, Julie Groce and Stephanie Miller, chief deputy clerk of the Superior Court Clerk’s Office that launched the Enslaved People Project to digitize old courthouse records for a searchable database.
They will share their findings and answer questions in a panel discussion Sunday at 2 p.m. during Hay Day.
Official documents recording the purchase and sale of slaves might be all that’s known of some of them. But additional glimpses into the lives of those who worked for the Johnston, Felton and Hay families came from a trove of letters preserved by the those who lived in the home for more than a century from the 1850s to the 1960s.
“It’s just nice to be able to document that somebody did exist, what they did, what their family would go on to do, and so forth, so they’re not faceless figures in history. To show that their contributions were actually acknowledged,” Jackson said.
She has been gleaning bits and pieces about the life of Primus Moore, who was owned by the master builder of the Hay House and known for his excellent plastering skills.
“(Moore’s) well documented because of the fact he worked for James Ayers. He was enslaved by James Ayers,” Jackson said. “The (Ayers) family has kept up talking over the years, even into the ‘20s, about the good work he did around Macon as a plasterer, not just on the house, but on other buildings that he was hired to work on.”
Macon-Bibb County’s City Hall is another example of Moore’s craftsmanship that stands the test of time.
The timeline for Adeline Hall begins with the bill of sale that shows the Johnston family purchased her in 1857 while the house was still under construction.
“She comes in as an enslaved worker in the house, but she cares for the children. She is documented in dozens of family letters, so we were able to pull those letters out and give Adeline a story,” Newby said.
Stunning portraits of Hall trace the decades of her service as a likely testament to her significance to the family.
“We will never know the whole story of how people treat one another,” Jackson pointed out.
“This is a way for us to ensure that at least these African Americans, even though we don’t know their personal feelings toward the person who enslaved them or hired them, are at least acknowledged as part of the community so we won’t have ‘invisible hands’ at work.”
With every piece of the puzzle including from family letters from the 1830s to the 1920s, those personalities come into focus. One piece of paper can unlock the mysteries of another as the researchers cross-reference their material and fill in the gaps.
“We’re getting more names and so forth,” Jackson said.
The research stretches to the Civil Rights era and Chester Davis who was hired as a butler and chauffeur for the Hays in the 1950s.
Davis, whose white jacket was already on display before this latest project, served as caretaker for the house and gets credit for keeping it safe when it was vacant for 15 years beginning in 1962 when it ceased being a private residence after Mrs. Hay’s death.
In 1964 after the heirs established the P.L. Hay Foundation, Davis became the first tour guide and docent when they opened up the family home to the public. He was hired by the Georgia Trust when it assumed ownership in 1977.
“People have such a beloved memory of him. One of the really cool things, though, is that we actually have two audio recordings of his tour of the house,” Newby said.
QR codes scattered along the tour connect visitors to Davis’ tours from decades past as he speaks about their china patterns and massive front doors that are 12 inches thick.
“Chester loved the house so much that it’s so great to hear his love of the house,” he said.
Davis retired in 1982, more than a dozen years before Newby volunteered to share Hay House’s history with visitors.
Newby’s seen and studied the artifacts and photographs from more than a century ago, but enlarging some of those portraits had an emotional impact on him.
“You walk in and then you see them this large and you realize that suddenly you’re giving them that voice. You’re giving them the opportunity for their story to be told,” he said. “And they were as much a part of this house as the people that we talk about everyday… and probably really knew it better than the people that we talk about every day.”
— Civic Journalism Senior Fellow Liz Fabian covers Macon-Bibb County government entities for The Macon Newsroom and can be reached at fabian_lj@mercer.edu or 478-301-2976.
