Those who complained about the roles played by Black servers and the implicit celebration of slavery were characterized by proprietors as “Northern liberals,” though there is evidence that some Southerners and Westerners were also critical. It was a tour bus stop, and a favorite of President Jimmy Carter and conventioneers such as members of the American Bar Association. The restaurant drew Georgians from Smyrna and Atlanta, as well as visitors from all over the country and the world. However, they continued to carry yoke-style wooden menu boards around their necks while they shouted out the menu offerings. The restaurant’s third owner, George “Pongo” Poole, continued the song and dance tradition into the 1980s, although when a cabaret tax was demanded, dancing by the Black boys stopped. According to a newspaper report in 1977 the restaurant’s decor included framed advertisements for slaves. They elaborated the Aunt Fanny legend, enacted in what are known as “Blacks in Blackface” scenes where cheerful servers sang, danced, and even joined patrons in singing “Dixie,” the anthem of the ante-bellum South. She leased the business in 1947, selling it to lessees Harvey Hester and Marjorie Bowman in 1954. She named it Aunt Fanny’s Cabin, hosting ladies’ luncheons, bridge clubs, and bridal showers. She was in service to socialite Isoline Campbell McKenna in 1941 when McKenna opened a tea room-style eating place on family property near their summer home. How willingly or why she adopted the ex-slave persona is unknown.įanny Williams was a servant to a wealthy Atlanta family named Campbell.
Far from an ancient rural yokel, she was about 81 when she died, a city dweller in Atlanta, and active in raising funds for her church there. Poole’s estimate of her 112 years had been preposterous – only a few dozen people worldwide were known to have attained that age - but newspapers had been much inclined to lax reporting when it came to Aunt Fanny’s Cabin. However it was revealed after the restaurant closed in the 1990s that she was born after the Civil War and had never lived in the cabin, which itself dated from the 1890s.
Indeed there was a real Afro-American woman named Fanny Williams. She was “about 112 years old” when she died, restaurant owner George Poole told a reporter in 1982. At her death in 1949 legend had it that she was very old, her age ranging from somewhere in the 90s to much older. Famous, but also infamous in its day because of how it portrayed the South before the Civil War and Emancipation as a world of smiling slaves who loved serving the kindly white people who held them captive.īeyond its costumed mammy servers and the Black children who boisterously recited the menu, sang, danced, and proclaimed the South would rise again, the proprietors of Aunt Fanny’s Cabin restaurant in Smyrna GA created a legend regarding its name and building which appropriated and falsified the life story of a living woman.Īccording to an oft-told tale, the restaurant’s core building was a relic of the Civil War era and the home of a former slave, Fanny Williams, who spent her last years sitting on the restaurant’s front porch telling of the war and its aftermath.
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