West Central Georgia

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"Someday," Mike said, "I'd like to turn some of them into cabins for weekend guests."

A short distance from the house, a 25-acre lake—in whose fish-filled waters Mike has created small islands as nesting places for migratory geese—provides the power for an old grist mill. There's been a mill on the site since 1840, and this one, built by Mike's great-grandfather and grandfather Fielder, has been turning out whole-wheat flour, grits and cornmeal since 1935. He started up the 25-horsepower mill to show me how it operated, but had to stop it to clean out the water intake valve.

"I bet the beavers have tried to close up the hole again," he said, but pulled out three big terrapins instead.

Mike took over the mill's operation when he was 14 years old—though just on weekends during his college days-and has loyal local and mail-order customers. In fact, as he was under the mills hauling out handfuls of terrapin, a customer arrived with her 90year-old mother, who admitted that they simply enjoy coming out to Patsiliga.

Much of the attraction lies in Buckner's innate graciousness. Polite ma'ams and sirs roll off Mike's tongue with all the ease of a New York cab driver's curses. And Buckner isn't unusual in this. In fact, such everyday good manners are more the rule than the exception in this part of the country and are among West Central Georgia's most attractive assets.

Living on the Fall Line

In addition to all their other projects, Mike keeps bees, and—"just for the fun of it"—grows sugar cane, which he plants and grinds in the old-fashioned way with the help of his "tractor," Big Max, a 1,700-pound steed that's part Belgian and part quarter horse. The Buckners' large garden thrives in this unique area of southern Talbot and Harris counties known as the Fall Line, for this was the shoreline of the ocean that covered large sections of the Southeast about five million years ago. Just a few miles to the north, the soil is heavily mixed with red clay, but here it's sandy loam. Not far away, near junction City (pop. 250), three companies mine what was once beach sand for use in construction, glass, computer chips and filters.

"This whole foothill area sits on what is called the crustaceous aquifer, a recharge system for southern Georgia and northern Florida," Mike explained. "The water of springs that boil up down there is actually from here. Our local wells come in at 50 feet or less. However, if you hit granite, you'll never come out of it, because you'll have hit the base of Atlanta's Stone Mountain.

"There are plants on the Fall Line that aren't found anywhere else," Mike told me. "A turkey oak, for example, that won't grow more than head-high in 100 years. There's a red honeysuckle, too, that blooms in August. But we don't have the otherwise common south Georgia gnats, or even many mosquitoes. The Fall Line is often called the 'Gnat Line.'

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