Asa griggs buddy candler jr

American businessman

Asa Griggs "Buddie" Candler Jr. (August 27, 1880 – January 11, 1953) was an American businessman and the son of Asa Griggs Candler, founder of The Coca-Cola Company. Candler Jr. helped build his father's business into an empire. He later became a real-estate developer, opening the Briarcliff Hotel at the corner of Ponce de Leon Avenue and N. Highland Ave in the Virginia–Highland neighborhood of Atlanta.

Life and career

Education and career

Asa Jr. attended Emory College at its original campus in Oxford, Georgia and was a classmate of the future vice president Alben W. Barkley. After graduation he helped set up bottling plants for Coca-Cola across North America. He also supervised construction of various office buildings in Atlanta and of Candler Airport, now known as the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Additionally, for more than 20 years, Candler was involved in running Westview Cemetery in Atlanta, where he built one of the largest community mausoleums in the world.

Briarcliff Farm

In 1910, Candler moved from the fashionable Inman Park neighborhood where his father also had a mansion, to a "ramshackle" farmhouse on Briarcliff Farm, 42 acres (17 ha) on Williams Mill Road in what is now the Druid Hills neighborhood near Atlanta. Williams Mill Road was renamed Briarcliff Road in the 1920s after the estate that Candler built there. The farm was j

AsaGriggs(Buddie)CandlerJr

Son of Asa Griggs Candler and Lucy Elizabeth (Howard) Candler

Brother of Charles Howard Candler, Lucy Beall (Candler) Leide, Walter Turner Candler and William Beall Candler

Father of Lucy Magill (Candler) Thompson, Asa Griggs Candler III, John Howard Candler Sr, Laura (Candler) Chambers, Helen (Candler) Davidson, Martha (Candler) Callaway and Samuel Candler

Profile last modified | Created 26 Dec 2008

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Biography

Asa G Candler was enumerated as son of the head of household in Edgewood (excl. Atlanta city), Fulton County, Georgia for the June 25, United States Census, 1900. He was noted as born August 1880 in Georgia and single. He was a clerk as seen in an image of the original census. Also included in the household are head Asa G Candler, wife Lucy E Candler, son Chas H Candler, daughter Lucy B Candler, son Walter T Candler, son Wm Candler, servant Mollie Jones and son (of servant) Harvey Jones.

Asa G Candler wed Hellen Magill July 16, 1901 in Hart County, Georgia as seen in an image of the original marriage register.

A G Candler Jr. was enumerated as head of the household at 220 Euclid Avenue, Atlanta Ward 9, Fulton County, Georgia for the April 20, United States Census, 1910. He was noted as born 1881 in Georgia and had been married nine years. He was a manager of an office building (Candler Building) and an owner as seen in the image of the original census. Also included in the household are wife Helen Candler, daughter Lucy Candler, son John Candler, daughter Laura Candler, brother-in-law W W Mcgill and servant Landrum Anderson.

Asa Griggs Candler registered for military service as recorded in this September 12, 1918 United

His burial became a point of contention among his wife and children. Believing that West View Mausoleum and Abbey would be completed and that it would achieve the status he dreamed of, he expected to be interred in a marble sarcophagus in a place of special honor within his mausoleum. He would be a pharaoh in his own Great Pyramid. But work on the mausoleum had ground to a halt. Large sections, including most of the third floor, were still incomplete and the new management hadn’t prioritized funding.

Florence did not intend to honor his wishes. Some of his children fought her, believing he should have his final wish honored. Eventually she won and had him interred in the lawn in his family plot, next to his first wife, Helen, and his first son, Asa III. Later Florence would be buried next to him. Some of his children would also eventually occupy spaces in the family plot. Finally, Florence had a monument erected in his honor, something his landscaping revisions had tried to eliminate.

The monument is simple, which itself is confirmation that he wasn’t involved in its design. It is visually unobtrusive and easy to drive past without noticing, which Buddie would have never agreed to. His headstone lies flat to the ground, consistent with his redesign, and often is covered in a layer of dried grass clippings. A large ant colony has taken over the far corner, near his son John’s headstone. Sixty years after his passing, his grave is mostly unvisited, and no one leaves flowers.

Except for me. I try to leave flowers when I visit, if only to say thank you for the stories.

Nestled in the outskirts of the city of Atlanta, in a suburb called Druid Hills, lies Briarcliff Mansion. It sits on Briarcliff Road in the Briarcliff neighborhood, surrounded by strip malls and businesses with the name Briarcliff in their signage. The mansion and the land it occupies are owned by Emory University, which refers to the area as its Briarcliff Campus.

Briarcliff Mansion once belonged to a man named Asa Candler, Jr., or Buddie as friends and family knew him. The second son and namesake of Coca Cola founder Asa Griggs Candler, Buddie was a wealthy real estate developer and socialite whose big, boisterous personality made him both beloved and reviled in the Atlanta community between 1910 and 1950.

These days Buddie is mostly forgotten. When he’s remembered he’s typically described by two adjectives: eccentric and alcoholic. While both adjectives are accurate, they’re only a tiny slice of who he was as a man. This persistent reputation is perpetuated by a Wikipedia entry that draws the majority of its facts from a narrow set of relatively unnuanced sources, which mostly exist to capture the history of the mansion. Because the mansion and its preservation are the primary focus, the parts of his life relevant to the mansion are the ones that are repeated over and over, on blogs and in newsletters, all referencing each other in a circular manner that distorts and narrows over time.

I, too, am interested in the preservation of Briarcliff Mansion. But in learning about its history I realized that I was getting only snippets of its owner’s life, and most of those snippets were self-referential. One blog made a claim because another blog made a claim because a newsletter made a claim because the first blog made a claim. None of which ever pointed back to original source material or evidence. After reading as much as I could on the internet, I was still left with a remaining question:

I figured out quickly that I would have to dig