West Central Georgia

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Four years ago, three Atlanta women bought up one side of the main street in the sleepy little town of Warm Springs (pop. 425) and opened some craft stores and a fine restaurant. Today, the town contains over 50 antiques stores and crafts shops and has become a major tourist attraction.

Other natural springs, though not warm ones, gurgle up elsewhere and were once health spas. Now, one, Cold Springs, is used as a state fish hatchery. The others, along with their long-gone guest houses and hotels, are no longer commercialized, as I discovered when I drove out to check on iron-rich Chalybeate Springs. I saw no sign of it, other than the small community by that name. Just beyond there, however, I discovered a valley of breathtaking beauty. Dan Herrema, from Michigan, and his wife, Linda, a Floridian, recently bought 50 acres in this area after living for a number of years in Atlanta's suburb of Marietta.

"At first we missed the culture, good wines and other amenities of city living," they told me. "But, lately, we go to Atlanta maybe once a month—and that's almost too much anymore."

Instead, they've enthusiastically joined the Pine Mountain Regional Arts Council. This organization's active guilds for theater, writing and arts and crafts bring together—both socially and for various projects—the many talented writers, actors and artists of Harris, Meriwether and Talbot counties.

LaGrange in Troup County offers quite a bit of culture itself, as well as an excellent medical center with more specialists per capita than any other city in Georgia. Furthermore, almost from its incorporation in 1828, the town has been a bastion for female rights. LaGrange College—coed since 1953, with a present enrollment of 1,000 students—was founded in 1831 as the LaGrange Female Academy, making it the oldest independent school in Georgia. It was also the first American women's college to offer an M.A. degree. (During the Civil War, the city of LaGrange had the only military company of women soldiers ever to be commissioned for duty on this continent.) Though LaGrange College's most popular degrees are now in business and computer science, it's long been known for turning out students superior in music, art and—particularly—drama. Its stock company performs at Callaway Gardens each summer.

Troup also contains the 25,900-acre West Point Lake with its many marinas, camping areas, swimming beaches, fishing piers and a 3,000-acre game preserve. Using locks, you can go by boat from here down the Chattahoochee River to the Gulf of Mexico.

But "if I had my druthers," as people around here say, I'd probably pick Harris County's little town of Pine Mountain (pop. 984) or nearby Pine Mountain Valley as nice places to live. The prime attraction is Callaway Gardens, a 14,000-acre, nonprofit botanical paradise built by LaGrange's Callaway family.

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