Georgia's Earliest Home Movies Donated to UGA Media Archives

With its mild climate and beautiful landscapes, post-Civil War Thomasville, Georgia, became the winter home for many wealthy Northerners. Among them was the Howard Melville Hanna family from Cleveland, Ohio, whose Georgia estate was called Pebble Hill.

The last family member who lived at Pebble Hill was to live there Elizabeth “Pansy” Ireland Poe, and she created a foundation to preserve both the house and grounds. The Pebble Hill Foundaiton trustees donated the early home movie footage to the University of Georgia's Walter J. Brown Media Archives, & Peabody Awards Collection, where it  will be preserved and protected.

The archives is one of three special collections libraries housed in the Richard J. Russell building on campus.

According to a UGA press release, many of the movies feature "Miss Pansy," granddaughter of Howard Melville Hanna, and extended family members. They show friends and plantation workers, a summer home in Maine, and the many animals that were part of life at Pebble Hill.

The foundation also gave the media archives three 28mm Bray Studios cartoons for home viewing, as well as 70 episodes of a syndicated hunting and fishing television show from the 1950s called “The Sportsman’s Club.”

The home movies given to UGA are in 28mm, 16mm, and 8mm, and they span from around 1917 into the 1960s. Archives director Ruta Abolins said that the movies may  be the earliest moving images shot in Georgia.

The library will be funding their preservation, she said, so they can be shared across the state and at Pebble Hill itself.