About Dewberry and Park City

Even though we’ve been living in Northwestern Georgia for some time now we’re still discovering communities only a short distance from our house. Part of the reason for that is that almost nothing is laid-out in the familiar grid pattern. Roads follow the direction dictated by the ubiquitous hills and mountains that dominate the area. Straight, flat roads are rare. Curving, up-and-down roads are the norm. It’s fun to drive on these roads. They're often narrow with trees on both sides and little traffic. You round a curve and suddenly find yourself in a small community. It was on one such road one day last spring that we came across the Dewberry/Park City Community Cemetery.

Having been involved in genealogy for over 25 years, cemeteries draw my attention like a magnet. Except for the sign this cemetery looks to be forgotten. From the road, portions of a grave marker and cross can be seen in the thick brush. Such finds are a genealogist’s dream or nightmare depending on your point of view. The people buried here are forgotten, as if they never existed. Die-hard genealogists often will scour abandoned cemeteries, recording whatever information is available on grave markers and posting it to various internet sites.

My curiosity got the best of me. It was mid-day, hot and muggy, and the brush was shoulder high, comprised mostly of thorny raspberry bushes. I made a mental note to return in two weeks when those berries should be ripe, but didn't do it. I found two grave markers, both members of a Buchanan family. Surprisingly, the deaths occurred 1981 and 1992. I expected the graves to be much older. I was not able to reach the cross. There probably are more graves but a machete would be needed to find them.

About a mile further down the road we came upon the Dewberry and Park City Community Playground. It’s a decent little park, I assume maintained by the residents, who seem to be very adamant about what goes on in their park. The sign brought a smile to my face, and I remember thinking, "Yeah, this is the south."

I don't know this for a fact but I'm assuming that Dewberry and Park City are census designated places, just like Fairview. To my knowledge these communities don't have any governmental agencies: no police force, fire department, no city hall, no nothing.I wonder if that explains why the cemetery is not maintained. But then where did the money come from for the playground? I had never heard of census designated places before. From now on when I write about them I will refer to them as CDP. I thought that maybe they're unique to the south. So I googled census designated places in Wisconsin. Turns out that Wisconsin has 179. Georgia has 89. Just shows what I know; or don't know.

What's it like where you live?

That's another question we're often asked, both from friends and family in Peru, and in Wisconsin. The initial post explained why and how we located here. It seems only natural that the second post should deal with the physical area as well as the culture and customs as we see them, and to compare those same concepts to our former residence in Wisconsin, and by extension to the surrounding mid-western states. To describe and contrast the geography of both locations is not going to be a problem: all I have to do is organize my thoughts and start typing. But as I'm thinking about it from the other perspective; society, culture and customs I can see that it's not going to be so easy. The differences are not dramatic...in fact they're subtle and it's only by looking at them in total that a picture of the southern culture emerges as I see it, or what remains of it. There are many, many transplants living here.

Let's start with a geographical broad brush. Northern Wisconsin is mostly flat with lots of agriculture and forests. There are small to medium sized towns scattered throughout. There are thousands of lakes and rivers both big and small. Many of those lakes had resorts where families would spend their summer vacations but that was a different era and the few remaining resorts are struggling to hang on. But that's not pertinent to this discussion. 

The area we live now is mostly hills, mountains and forest. We don't see much farming or ranching of any kind, and lakes are few and far between. Let me digress here for a minute. I said in the description portion of this blog that we live in a census designated place. The name of that place is Fairview. Our mailing address is Rossville but we live in Fairview. If you're interested you can Google Fairview to see a map and a few demographic statistics. We live in a typical house in a typical Fairview neighborhood located at the bottom of Missionary Ridge of Civil War fame. We can see Lookout Mountain from our driveway. 

In Wisconsin we could look out our window and see pine, cedar, catalpa (we used to call these Indian cigar trees when we were kids) spruce and oak trees. Here in Fairview we look out our window and see the same trees plus pecan, walnut and chestnut. When I was a kid pine trees in the northern forests were temples to me. They were everything that symbolized "The great up north." I would bring pine cones home with me to Milwaukee and put them anywhere I could see and smell them to keep me connected to "up north." I'm talking about cones that were 6" long by 3" wide from trees that were sixty-five feet tall. Here in our yard is a slash pine tree that is seventy feet tall with the same sized cones. I guess I have to rethink my definition of up north. 

In Wisconsin the typical birds in our yard were blue jays, robins, cardinals, crows, wrens, and finches. We see those same birds here plus yellow bellied sapsuckers, bluebirds, woodpeckers and mockingbirds. Both places have squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks and field mice. What it boils down to is that with a few minor exceptions the views from our windows in Wisconsin and here in Fairview are the same. I didn't expect that. I don't know what I expected,, but sameness wasn't it.

Finishing up with geography, downtown Chattanooga is a fifteen minute drive, and the city of Fort Oglethorpe where we do most of our shopping is ten minutes away. Both Nashville and Atlanta are a two-hour drive. For us, though it pains me to say it, Fairview offers everything we had in Wisconsin plus more opportunity for entertainment, beautiful mountains and a better climate.

Now lets deal with the contrast in cultures. A good place to start would be with the notion of the "bible belt." Depending on the source there are anywhere from eight to sixteen states comprising the bible belt; all located in the south eastern section of the country. All of them are characterized as being more socially and politically conservative than the rest of the country, and having higher church attendance, which assumedly indicates a deeper seated religious conviction as well.

In our experience there are only a few physical manifestations of the bible belt. For example, in Wisconsin cities there is a tavern on every corner. Here there are churches on every corner, usually Baptist churches. There are many men wearing t-shirts that basically say, "Don't mess with my family, God or guns." There are lots of Donald Trump t-shirts and bumper stickers. Church activities are constantly taking place everywhere. Churches are the social hub in many communities. In our experience most gatherings, political and private begin and end with a prayer. 

I feel comfortable in a politically conservative setting, though I am not as stanch a conservative as many people I have met here. For example, during a recent discussion with a neighbor, he commented that in his opinion, "Donald Trump is the greatest president this country has ever had." I didn't respond...couldn't respond. To describe Trump as the greatest president ever is to me absolutely mind-blowing. I will say no more about the matter, at least not in this post.

In Peru it is normal for what people refer to as 'bible readers' to canvas neighborhoods and knock on doors Saturday and Sunday seeking converts. I expected that to be a common occurrence in the bible belt but it has happened only once in two and one-half years. Nor have I see any baptisms on the bank of the Tennessee River. That's sort of a joke. See, we northerners have an image of southerners lined up and singing along side some muddy creek, about to be dunked and...Ah, forget about it.  

I don't normally generalize; for instance during my time in Peru I never wrote or said the phrase 'Peruvians are.....' because there is way too much diversity between the regions, however I can say that of the people we have met, southerners are friendlier and much more willing to go out of their way to be helpful, and that seems to include those who are not native to the area. Seems like they have become 'southernized'. 

If I can summarize, I'll say that from my perspective southerners are more politically conservative, but it's not the in-your-face obnoxious conservatism. They are much more tolerant than that.  And while there is more emphasis on religion down here I haven't seen any extremists...it's more on a personal level and fellowship among like minds. On a recent visit to Wisconsin we were asked if there were many rednecks where we live. There are rednecks, just as there are rednecks everywhere, but I think I can honestly say we saw more rednecks in northern Wisconsin then in the Fairview area.

Now, all of the above is not to say everything is perfect down here. It's not. There are some things we'd like to see differently, and some things that are down right annoying, but I'll save those for down the road. For now I'll say that we were happy with our decision to come here two years ago and we're just as pleased today.

“Why did you choose this location?”

That is the question we were asked continuously when we first arrived in July of 2017, and are still being asked over two years later. Sometimes the tone of the person asking the question was simple curiosity, but occasionally it was almost disbelief, as in ‘What in the hell would you want to come here for!?” Apparently some folks are not too happy with the area for whatever reason, but I imagine that is probably true wherever people live. It was hard to give a simple answer so we’d usually just say “the climate” and let it go at that. But there was a lot more behind it than climate. To answer the question fully we need to go back a bit in time.

Maybe in some other post I’ll get into how we met and what led up to what but for now I’ll just say that Maribel is Peruvian; that she arrived in the USA/Wisconsin in June, 2006 on a fiancé visa and we were married the following September. Two years later several circumstances pretty much dictated that we move to Peru. Nearly ten years later those circumstances were resolved. Maribel loves her country but she loves the United States more. To this day we still debate about which one of us first broached the subject of returning to the States but it wasn’t long after before we were actively planning.

I am a planner. I put titles on grocery lists. I do everything possible to negate Murphy’s Law. So I started working on an Excel spreadsheet. The Y axis had every possible criterion we could think of…climate, cost of living, crime rate, days of sunshine, days of precipitation, ethnicity, average family income, access to major airports, expressways and major cities, and probably a dozen more that I can’t remember. The X axis on the top row contained the contender cities. With the criterion established I began Googling each of them. Without getting into the detail, I’ll just say that 75% of the returns pointed to the south east, and drilling down farther centered on the Chattanooga area. The added pluses that we hadn't thought about were the mountains, forests, Civil War sites and two-hour access to Nashville and Atlanta. I will always be a Wisconsinite at heart but those brutal winters were not something either of us wanted to face again.

Having decided on the area I contacted realtors in Chattanooga and other cities within a one hundred-mile radius and told each what our basic requirements were. In Wisconsin our house had been in a semi-country setting and we wanted that same setting if possible. While the realtors were looking Maribel and I were also searching realty sites, and developed a list of specific houses that looked promising.

With all of that going on, I was also busy contacting bankers. Interestingly, none of the bank’s on-line mortgage applications were set up to handle Peruvian addresses or Spanish bank names. In one case I actually rewrote the banks application to accommodate the issues. And it turns out that we actually had the pre-approval letter from that bank even before leaving Peru.

When we’d picked a date to leave I bought plane tickets, booked a hotel and reserved a rental car. The specific realtor we were working with had made viewing arrangements for all of the homes we had selected in her area. Packing was a challenge…what to take and more importantly what to leave, because we were not planning on returning, at least for a long time.

To finish this, we arrived at the Chattanooga airport, picked up the rental car, drove to the hotel that would be our ‘home’ for the next thirty-eight days, met the realtor the next morning, and ultimately bought the second house we looked at that day. And that is why we chose this location.

This post went longer than I expected it to. Maybe next time I’ll write about the differences we’ve seen/experienced between the Northwest Georgia area and Wisconsin. Or it could be that I’ll write about my view on the origin of the universe. We’ll see.