Atalaya

Atalaya, the winter home of two famous Americans, is now a state park and home of one of our favorite beaches.  In 1931 Archer Huntington bought over 10,000 acres of beach property in Georgetown County when his wife Anna's tuberculosis progressed and she needed a milder place to spend the winter and try to continue her work.

 Anna was a sculptor and Archer a well known scholar, businessman, and poet from Connecticut. 

 The house is empty now but you can take a very interesting tour, which we did when my daughter visited us.  

It was impossible to get one photo that shows how it looks, but the house is built around a square courtyard with a covered walkway down the middle and a tower.

Each side of the square is 200 feet long with rooms inside, a total of 30 rooms including those for live-in help.

 

Archer was the largest employer in the county during the Great Depression. He brought in skilled craftsmen from his Newport News Shipyard to train local people and then used entirely local labor to build Atalaya.  He was known to withhold his approval on projects and have them redone just to keep the men working during tough times.

The water tower for fresh water and the central walkway

Anna's sculptures were huge and she had both indoor and outdoor large studios.  The Huntingtons kept quite a menagerie of animals to pose as subjects for her sculptures, including horses and bears, so you can imagine how large the studios were.

 

 

 

 

During the 1930s the Huntingtons brought the first paved roads to Georgetown County as well as a clinic, schools, and a dentist office.

 

 

Nine thousand of the acres Huntington purchased are now Brookgreen Gardens, a botanical and sculpture garden the Huntingtons built to display Anna's and her friends' work.  

Next time I will show you some of the beautiful artwork in Brookgreen Gardens.