MEMORIES OF PEARL LAKE

MEMORIES OF PEARL LAKE

Friends at Pearl Lake

These young friends spent many happy days swimming at a former popular recreation spot in Coweta County known as Pearl Lake. The lake at a place once known as Pearl Spring off U.S. Highway 29 south of Newnan is now privately-owned and closed to the public. Mary McMichael Borders,, who was born in 1907, grew up at the lake with her brothers and sisters and has many happy memories of those years. She lived in the family home at the lakeside until she married in 1925. She remembers construction work on Hwy 29 and on Gordon Road to the east. Her father, William Alexander McMichael, built a boat house on the south side of the lake with dressing rooms, a tower in the water and diving boards. Mr. Alexander was good with his hands and showed little signs in his walk of the polio he had as a child. He constructed and painted small boats which he rented, and he ran a little snack area inside the boat house. There was also a pavilion nearby. Mrs. Borders remembers helping her father put special glue on the bottoms and him painting names on each boat. The children learned to swim and dive and rode in the boats. Mary and her sister Nellie, back, are shown about 1920 with two friends, Mary Bohannon and Sara Vickers Bailey.

Newnan Times-Herald

c.1920

Mary McMichael Borders

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CCR 1988.11.23

Photograph