Published Sunday, September 05, 2010

Featherston Fishing Club celebrates 100th

By Winston Skinner

The Newnan Times-Herald

The Featherston Fishing Club, which owns the property at the Coweta-Fayette line around Wynn's Pond, is celebrating a century.

Wynn's Pond has been a rural retreat for prominent Newnan families for more than 100 years. The lake -- no doubt called a "pond" because it was a mill pond in earlier times -- is a prime fishing spot. The lake, the docks and boathouses that surround it offer a spot of bucolic simplicity in the midst of what has become a developing area.

For most of its history, Wynn's Pond has been a rural place far from Newnan and at the edge of what was largely agricultural Fayette County. The development of Peachtree City and its expansion into eastern Coweta County has added a note of tension to the Featherson Fishing Club's centennial -- with members worried about what the development of adjacent tracts may mean for the quiet serenity that has made Wynn's Pond a haven.

Local historian Georgia Shapiro and her husband, Bob, own one of the cottages on the Coweta side of the pond. She is a descendant of John Wynn, who bought the land there more than 150 years ago.

John Wynn lived in Athens when the Creek Indian lands were being divided. Most of the woodland was divided into 202.5-acre land lots that were distributed through a lottery to Revolutionary War soldiers and their heirs. Shapiro explained that partial land lots in each county were retained by the state, and those partial land lots tended to be at county borders -- like the spot where Wynn's Pond is today.

John Wynn went to Milledgeville, then the state capital, and bought the partial land lots where Coweta and Fayette joined. "Over the years, he bought whole land lots that people had drawn in the lottery but never intended to come here," Shapiro related.

In 1841, John Wynn's son, Glen Owen Wynn, married Sarah Pope Lumpkin, in Athens. Her uncle, Wilson Lumpkin, was governor of Georgia from 1831-1835 and a relative of Ellis Arnall, a later governor of Georgia who was from Newnan.

Glen Owen Wynn and his bride were given the Coweta-Fayette land as a wedding gift and moved to this area. The pond apparently did not exist for some years as it "wasn't on the earliest maps," Shapiro said.

Their son, Joseph Henry Lumpkin Wynn, was known as "Cap'n Joe." He had a grist mill at what is now Wynn's Pond and was the likely builder of the pond itself.

"It was definitely built for fishing," Shapiro said, explaining that trees were simply cut -- leaving about 4 feet of stump -- some of which can still be seen when the lake is drained.

"The pond had been there for years" before the Featherston Fishing Club was incorporated on Aug. 13, 1910, Shapiro said. "We don't know how long those men had gone out there fishing."

Shapiro can remember seeing the mill building -- which was located near where the water system pumping station is located today -- when she visited Wynn's Pond as a girl.

When Joe Wynn died, his widow, Sallie Glass Wynn, moved to 34 Spring St. in Newnan -- living with family where Shapiro now operates a gift shop. The Wynns had six sons, but "nobody wanted to farm," Shapiro said.

Sallie Wynn decided to accept an offer from a group of Newnan businessmen to sell them the pond, 50 feet of property surrounding it and the mill property. The coalition became the Featherston Fishing Club, which continues to own Wynn's Pond today.

"The goal of the corporation is to maintain the pond as a fishing pond," Shapiro said.

People own shares in FFC, and anyone who is a shareholder can visit the property to fish, picnic or relax. The cabins are owned by families. They sell from time to time, but only the physical structures are sold. All the shareholders "own the land," Shapiro explained.

"There are a lot more shares than cabins," she said.

Many of the cabins on the Fayette side of the lake date to 1910 -- or maybe even earlier. "Some of the cabins may have already been there on the Fayette side," Shapiro said.

The Coweta cabins were built later because, at first, there was no access by road to that property. A story passed down relates that building materials were floated from the Fayette side to Coweta to start the road and make it possible to have cabins there, too.

FFC shareholders have concerns about what future development -- stores, a movie theater, a day-care center, sports facilities -- in the area may mean for them. "It looks like it's going to make us meander behind a shopping center to get here," said Dr. Kerry Elliott, who lives full-time at Wynn's Pond.

Already there is light from a nearby shopping center and road noise that were not part of Wynn's Pond until a few years ago. Still, the large flat rock adjacent to the pond's dam offers a spot to contemplate the days when children wandered the grounds and often turned up an arrowhead or two.

As a spray of water cascaded over the top of the dam, Shapiro looked around. "You can just picture the Indians living out here," she said.