I’m going to start by telling you who Asa Candler, Jr., was not.

The name Asa Candler usually refers to the man who started Coca Cola. Asa Griggs Candler, Sr., was born in Villa Rica, GA, in 1851. He moved to Atlanta to become a pharmacist in 1873 and fifteen years later purchased the Coca Cola formula from John Pemberton in 1888. He grew Coca Cola to become a multi-million dollar international brand, earning a phenomenal fortune off of nickel sodas. A marketing mastermind and savvy businessman, he diversified his interests and expanded into real estate and banking, and became heavily involved in Atlanta civics and urban development. In 1916 he was elected Mayor and saw the city through the crisis of the Great Fire of 1917. He bankrolled both the establishment of Emory University and the Druid Hills planned community in which it resides.

In Atlanta the name Candler is revered. It graces buildings, lakes and parks, and Coca Cola is a beloved home-grown success story. The illuminated red Coca Cola sign atop the company headquarters glows against the city skyline. The World of Coca Cola is one of Atlanta’s top attractions. The generic word for soda throughout the American South is, in fact, Coke. Turn your head in downtown Atlanta, and you’ll see either Coca Cola or the name Candler.

Asa, Sr., is the reason why Asa, Jr.’s, history was lost. A real estate powerhouse of great successes and greater failures, a man of big vision and bigger adventures, Asa, Jr., seized headlines and dominated the wealthy elite social scene during his lifetime. But after he passed in 1953 his stories were quickly lost, either tangled up with or overshadowed by his father. Documented histories of Hartsfield-Jackson Airport often erroneously credit its existence to Asa, Sr. Look up the history of Zoo Atlanta and you’ll find mixed reports about which Asa donated animals in the 1930s. Read the history of the Candler Regatta at St. Andrews Yacht Club in Panama City, FL, and the wrong Asa is named. Even the Atlanta History Center’s photo archive labels Asa, Jr., as Asa, Sr., in photos dated well after the elder Asa’s death.

Researching the life of Asa Candler, Jr., is like an archeological dig through artifacts that previous archeologists misidentified for decades.

Discovering the Other Asa

In 2015 I visited an abandoned mansion on a satellite campus of Emory University. I knew very little about it, just the few details that have remained in common circulation. From a quick browse of Wikipedia and a blog here and there I learned the following:

1. There once was a good and decent businessman who started Coca Cola.

2. He had an eccentric, alcoholic son who built a mansion, squandered his money, and sold it to the state before he died.

3. The mansion, known as Briarcliff, was used as a mental health and addiction treatment facility for 30 years before shutting down in the 1990s.

4. Oh, and by the way, he may have owned a private zoo.

I decided to visit the mansion to see it for myself and was instantly captivated. Briarcliff, which I’ve written extensively about here, is an anachronistic enigma. It’s self-consciously grandiose, built to present maximum grandeur to the neighboring properties. It towers over the landscape, set far back from the road behind a filled-in, overgrown pool. The face of the mansion is stitched together where a music hall was added two years after the main house was completed, and the bricks don’t quite match up. The addition created odd turns to the perimeter and a pair of strange courtyards seen only from above. Greenhouses around back remain standing, beautiful glass structures that still contain fixtures which once nurtured a botanical garden’s worth of exotic plants. A multi-car garage stretches along the rear driveway, and dormer windows dotting the roof line reveal that the mansion’s top floor is one big ballroom. What on earth is this decaying estate doing smack in the middle of Druid Hills, a residential suburb of moderately-sized homes?

So I started looking into it

As I read about the other Candler family homes, I uncovered more questions than I answered. The most pressing, or so I thought at the time, was why the property was called Briarcliff. Did Briarcliff Mansion come first or did Briarcliff Road and neighborhood come first? What about the Briarcliff Apartments at the intersection of Briarcliff Road and Ponce de Leon Avenue?

The life of Asa Candler, Sr., is well documented, so the world isn’t hurting for insights into his life and legacy. His oldest son, Charles Howard, second president of Coca Cola, left a mansion and a legacy, too. Their homes have names and the origins of those names are known. Asa Sr.’s younger three children, Lucy, Walter and William, all had mansions in the area, too. They had names, and their origins are known. But what about Briarcliff?

Why is Briarcliff named Briarcliff?

I got my answer, but it turns out that in order to understand the mansion, I had to understand the man. I now have a deep understanding of who Asa Candler, Jr. was, where his history was lost or twisted, what’s true in the myth that circulates today, and where Atlanta’s history needs correction.

Getting to an understanding required quite a bit of work. The output of that work is my new book, Fortune & Folly: The Weird and Wonderful Life of the South’s Most Eccentric Millionaire, which fully documents the life of Asa Candler, Jr. This website its associated Instagram account are intended to capture stories that deserve to be preserved but simply couldn’t fit within a single book.

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Related Sites

Background Radiation Blog
Asa G Candler Wikitree
Asa Candler, Jr. Wikipedia
Save Briarcliff Mansion
Emory University