King of the Forest...In the City

Kathleen Dupree

Atlanta, Georgia, the southern terminus of the Appalachian mountains, is a city of nearly 3 million. Concrete and steel buildings line I-285, a circular road surrounding a city which has sprawled outward from its downtown dozens of miles in every direction.

In a modern city such as this, where progress and homogenization have overtaken and greatly obliterated what was, just a quarter of a century ago, a city rooted in southern tradition, one does not expect to find a great deal of history left, much less legend. It was therefore a great surprise for us to discover recently in the wilds of this great city a legend in the making.

Buckhead, Atlanta, Georgia, USA ...party central on a weekend night, big money central on any business day of the year. Buckhead is a neighborhood of elite homes, international business addresses, famous bars and restaurants and trendy shops. The name, locals will tell you, comes from the time when a tavern stood near what is the present day intersection of Peachtree Road and Roswell Road, in the heart of Buckhead. Long before the Civil War made its devastating mark on Atlanta, the tavern was a meeting place where the road in from the mountains met up with the road that traversed the lowlands down to Savannah and the sea. One day, someone, maybe the tavern owner, maybe a patron, no one really knows who, hung by the door of the tavern the head of a great buck, antlers and all. Soon, the crossroads became known as Buckhead. The name remained with the area long after the battle of Nancy Creek in the Civil War, long after the turn of the century and long after the days when the 20s and 30s saw the influx of money into the area with great homes, grand even for that time, being built just down the road from where the tavern once stood.

If you have journeyed down Peachtree Road recently you may have noticed an interesting sight. Oddly out of place in the midst of the glass and concrete that surrounds it, in the front yard of the Marriott hotel at the intersection of Peachtree and Piedmont, stands a great and imposing bronze statue. It appears as if it could have been taken straight out of the turn of the last century instead of 1999. It is a statue of a man, seated on a log. His feet are the feet of a deer and his head is that of a great buck. In his hand he hold a staff, crowned with a lantern at the end of each of its two prongs. In his present position amid a grove of evergreens he reminds one of the Great God Herne, King of the Forest and Lord of the Animals in Celtic lore.

The statue was created by Frank Flemming and commissioned by The Buckhead Coalition, a group of independent business people interested in improving the area. In 1999 the statue will be moved from its present location to Triangle Park as part of overall improvements to the park undertaken by the Coalition in conjunction with the city of Atlanta. When completed, the statue will be the centerpiece of a group of smaller bronze statues depicting various animals. Triangle Park is located at the intersection of Peachtree Road and Roswell Road, just a short distance from where the statue now sits and very near where the original tavern stood that gave Buckhead its name.

The concept behind the statue is that the great Buck is telling the other animals the story of Buckhead and how the neighborhood got its name. Reminiscent of the ethereal bronzes produced by artists in the 1890s that depicted nymphs, fairies and other mythological creatures, the Buckhead statue evokes a sense of otherworldliness, a tie to the mythical past.

As the world moved into the twentieth century, the theme of the "Celtic Twilight" was a popular one in the world of art and literature. Depictions of King Arthur and the Celtic otherworld gave people a feeling that there was something old and deep and secure that the spirit could hold on to in the face of coming change. The Buckhead statue, whose name has not been given out either by its creator or the organization that commissioned it, roots the viewer in the Celtic past again. As the noise and pollution of Peachtree Road swirls around him, he stands guard over legends and folklore that keep the Celtic spirit alive as we get ready to leap again into another century.