Qualla: Hills and Dales Estate: Where Seventy Years of Love Built a Garden https://qualla.com/hills-and-dales-estate en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:13 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/d/j/g/e/hills-and-dales-estate-wp/hills-dales-estate-side-view.jpg Qualla: Hills and Dales Estate: Where Seventy Years of Love Built a Garden https://qualla.com/hills-and-dales-estate Hills and Dales Estate: Where Seventy Years of Love Built a Garden: Introduction https://qualla.com/hills-and-dales-estate/ Photo credit Ethan Smith, CC BY-SA 3.0. 'Forestry and botanical experts, amazed at the wonderful growth of flowers, shrubs and trees, have tried to explain this phenomenon by stating that there is some peculiar property of the soil, but they are wrong,' Fuller Callaway told The Atlanta Journal in 1916. 'It's just ordinary, LaGrange, Georgia soil. The real cause of the wonders which exist in this garden is the seventy years of love and devoted care which Mrs. Ferrell gave to the garden.' Callaway was standing in the gardens of his new Italian villa in LaGrange, built to complement grounds that Sarah Ferrell had been cultivating since 1841 -- gardens begun on a cotton slope, shaped with religious devotion, and still growing when a textile fortune married itself to their beauty.

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]]> Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/j/g/e/hills-and-dales-estate-wp/djge-hills-and-dales-estate-where-seventy-years-of-love-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Hills and Dales Estate: Where Seventy Years of Love Built a Garden: A Garden Planted in Faith https://qualla.com/hills-and-dales-estate/ Photo credit Ethan Smith, CC BY-SA 3.0. The story of Hills and Dales begins not with the Callaways but with the Ferrells. Blount and Sarah Ferrell married in 1835 and settled on land given to them by her father. In 1841, Sarah Ferrell began transforming a slope that had been used for cotton cultivation into a formal bo...

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]]> Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/j/g/e/hills-and-dales-estate-wp/djge-hills-and-dales-estate-where-seventy-years-of-love-a-garden-planted-in-faith.mp3 0:06 2 full Hills and Dales Estate: Where Seventy Years of Love Built a Garden: The Five-and-Ten-Cent Magnate https://qualla.com/hills-and-dales-estate/ Photo credit Ethan Smith, CC BY-SA 3.0. Fuller Earle Callaway was born in 1870 in Troup County, Georgia, and showed entrepreneurial instincts from an early age, selling sundries to rural housewives while also farming. At eighteen, he opened a five-and-ten-cent store. Soon he owned several stores and a wholesale busines...

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]]> Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/j/g/e/hills-and-dales-estate-wp/djge-hills-and-dales-estate-where-seventy-years-of-love-the-five-and-ten-cent-magnate.mp3 0:06 3 full Hills and Dales Estate: Where Seventy Years of Love Built a Garden: An Italian Villa in Georgia's Famous Garden https://qualla.com/hills-and-dales-estate/ Photo credit Ethan Smith, CC BY-SA 3.0. Architect Neel Reid of the Hentz, Reid & Adler firm designed the Callaway home, drawing inspiration from his favorite architect Charles Adams Platt and Platt's adaptations of Italian villas set within formal landscape gardens. The result is unmistakably Mediterranean: white stucc...

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]]> Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/j/g/e/hills-and-dales-estate-wp/djge-hills-and-dales-estate-where-seventy-years-of-love-an-italian-villa-in-georgias-famous-garden.mp3 0:06 4 full Hills and Dales Estate: Where Seventy Years of Love Built a Garden: The Sealed Bid https://qualla.com/hills-and-dales-estate/ Photo credit SanjibLemar, Public domain. Ida Callaway died in 1936. Their two sons, Cason and Fuller Jr., both wanted the family home. Rather than argue, they submitted sealed bids. Fuller Jr. later said he 'worried half the night that he wouldn't get the place and the other half of the night that he would.' The bids we...

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]]> Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/j/g/e/hills-and-dales-estate-wp/djge-hills-and-dales-estate-where-seventy-years-of-love-the-sealed-bid.mp3 0:06 5 full Hills and Dales Estate: Where Seventy Years of Love Built a Garden: Open Doors https://qualla.com/hills-and-dales-estate/ Photo credit Ethan Smith, CC BY-SA 3.0. Following the Callaway family's wishes, the estate became a museum. After renovations and the addition of a visitor center, Hills and Dales opened to the public in October 2004. Further renovations on the second and third floors were completed in April 2010, and today visitors to...

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]]> Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/j/g/e/hills-and-dales-estate-wp/djge-hills-and-dales-estate-where-seventy-years-of-love-open-doors.mp3 0:06 6 full