SERVING THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF DRUID HILLS

A COMMUNITY NESTLED IN THE HEART OF ATLANTA, GEORGIA


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FUN WITH DRUID HILLS FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS

Wow! What an amazing 2024 Historic Druid Hills Home & Garden Tour!

Thank you to our sponsors and everyone who purchased tickets, supporting our wonderful Druid Hills neighborhood. Our deepest gratitude to the fabulous hosts for opening your homes and gardens to us, and to all of the volunteers who helped us execute another wildly successful Historic Druid Hills Home & Garden Tour. Learn more about our annual Tour here.

Our annual Druid Hills Gala at Callanwolde was an amazing time, too. Make sure to join us the Wednesday before the Tour next year! This is just one of the many Druid Hills Spring Celebration events that we organize and fund with our neighborhood partners at the end of each April.

DRUID HILLS 4th of July Parade 2023...No raining on this parade!

Thank you to everyone who turned out despite the iffy conditions - we were all grateful that the rain stopped just in time for us to march through the neighborhood. 🤩 A big thanks to Phil and Caroline Moise for once again sharing your front yard and the lemonade. And, of course, we appreciate our membership committee for organizing this wonderful community event!



A special thanks to Coca-Cola for sponsoring our Spring Celebration!

In addition to being a generous financial donor, they turned out a HUGE group of volunteers to the Clean Up the Creek clean-up event. They also supplied, stocked, and served all of the Smart Water and soft drinks that attendees enjoyed at all Spring Celebration events. We are so grateful for their enthusiastic support!


Emory Village Alliance hosted the Coca-Cola ‘Cleanup the Creek’ Concert with South Fork Conservancy on the beautiful Saturday evening, April 22. Emory Village was packed with neighbors of all ages enjoying Michelle Malone's return to the Village with her talented band Canyonland. We couldn't have asked for a more perfect to kick off the Spring Celebration!


Callanwolde opened its gorgeous historic mansion to celebrate Frederick Law Olmsted Sr's 201st birthday at the Druid Hills Gala. Guests loved the food by Zest, signature drinks by Herb from Decatur Package Store, and dancing to Joe Gransden's jazz band. Looks like a must-do for 2024!


The Historic Druid Hills Home & Garden Tour was another fantastic success! Tour-goers repeatedly told us how much they enjoyed exploring such a variety of home styles and greenspaces that we featured this year. We were so grateful to have experts from Georgia Native Plant Society volunteering in our greenspace sites to guide and answer questions from tour-goers. We can't wait to see what our 2024 Tour will offer!
We've put together a recap with lots of photos on our Tour website - make sure to check it out! If you're interested in getting involved next year, we'd love to hear from you now. Everything you need to know is on our site.

Many of our neighbors visited Peavine Trail for the first time during our Spring Celebration! South Fork Conservancy hosted the Clean Up the Creek event where volunteers cleared space for new plantings, tidied the trail, installed a new handrail for the steps, and hauled out 10 bags of trash from the area around Peavine Creek.
The group also hosted a very successful interactive planting event for children, Help a Hummingbird. Families learned fun facts about these tiny birds from the engaging Josiah Patrick, a bird expert from GA Audubon, and planted things that hummingbirds like to eat around Peavine Trail Rain Garden.

Those are just a few highlights and there was SO MUCH MORE...from Tours of Deepdene and a Tree Walk with Erica Glasner to Prosecco in the Park with OLPA & Olmsted Plein Air and SPARK children serenading school visitors, this Celebration was packed with events and one for the books!

✨ Druid Hills Holiday House Decorating Contest✨

January 2023

Thank you to everyone who participated in this fun community event, brought to you by the DHCA membership committee! We heard from many neighbors that they enjoyed not only nominating their favorite homes, but also driving around to see ALL of the nominations before picking their favorites and voting.

 

1379 Emory Rd won first place in the "Extra" Creative category. 1658 East Clifton won a close second prize.


940 Clifton Rd won first place in the Classically Beautiful category, narrowly beating out the runner up, 6158 East Clifton Rd.


Emory Village Alliance hosts ANOTHER FANTASTIC Open Streets 

October 2022

EVA did a wonderful job of bringing different community organizations together to host the annual Emory Village Open Streets Event.

The Druid Hills Civic Association once again hosted the Halloween Costume contest and Parade. It was a smashing success with our local resident drummers, Van Biesel and Barry Zipperman leading the community parade along with our elected officials. And a big special thank you to the Cutts Family who designed and produced our fantastic Parade signs!

DHCA events are brought to you by our membership committee. We'd love more hands as we plan and execute more community activities like these! Email our membership director, Thea Roeser, to join this great committee.

Enjoy photos of the event at druidhills.org, thanks to Tina Hart.

DRUID HILLS 4th of July Parade 2022...what fun, what a turnout!

It was wonderful to see hundreds of neighbors of all ages join our annual Druid Hills 4th of July parade. What a treasured Druid Hills tradition, started by Juanita Edwards in 1976Thank you, Phil and Caroline Moise, for once again sharing your front yard and the lemonade! We would also like to thank our wonderful community partners for helping the DHCA provide all of the fun giveaways and goodies.

A special thank you is owed to Kit Eisterhold for providing and distributing all of the small flags around the neighborhood, the Boy Scouts for leading the parade, the DeKalb Fire Department for providing the fire truck, and our neighborhood marching band for the patriotic tunes      Of course, we can't forget to thank the fabulous DHCA volunteers who planned and executed this fantastic event!

Your DHCA membership helped us provide funding for the police escort, cookies, bottled water, ice, and ice pops. Thank you for being a part of our organization. Not a member? Join the DHCA today!

THE HISTORY OF THE DRUID HILLS FOURTH OF JULY PARADE

By Claudia Edwards, as told to her by husband Louis Edwards

(from the November 2016 Druid Hills News - reprinted from a 2007 Druid Hills News)

Juanita Edwards, my mother-in-law who lived in Druid Hills, started the Fourth of July Parade. In the early 1970’s, Juanita had been taking her children to the WSB (Channel 2) Parade downtown and wished there was a neighborhood parade instead. In 1976, the Bicentennial year, she decided she would organize a parade. She put up a couple of signs and started the parade at The By Way and Oakdale.

At 2 p.m., on that cloudy and drizzly July 4th, the first parade had 20 participants (five of those being the Edwards family). They paraded, without a police escort, up Th e By Way to Oxford to N. Decatur and down Oakdale. On N. Decatur, the 20 patriotic souls just walked down the sidewalk to Oakdale since they did not have an escort. Ward Edwards and Dick Hubert played trombone. John Freeman played clarinet. Laura and Marianne Mayer played the flute and piccolo. Louis Edwards played the snare drum and did the cadences. Donald Mayer played the bass drum that Ward (Louis’s dad) made from a collection barrel of a shop vac. Louis recalls it being a lot of fun and Juanita was either carrying the flag or playing a tambourine.

The next year, she put out a couple more signs and called a couple of people to increase attendance. She arranged a police escort and she moved up the time of the parade so people who were running the Peachtree Road Race could participate. She also talked to Bucky Johnson, the band director at DHHS, who provided old band sheet music parts for patriotic songs. Juanita decided the band needed a name and she did not want to insult or compete with the DHHS band so she called this band the Lesser Druid Hills Marching Band. Th at year, the band had a practice and as Louis recalls, there was hardly anyone there.

When the Edwards family arrived at the parade that year, they could not believe the number of people: 75+. Th e following year it was much bigger and Louis does think that it grows every year. Now, Juanita’s grandchildren are in the parade. Her first grandchild made her debut a decade ago at 3 months old in a Baby Bjorn (baby carrier).

Louis says that his mother thought it was a lot of fun and was happy people enjoyed it. Th e neighborhood parade was perfect because it was fun and involved everyone. Juanita would love the way the tradition has carried on. It is exactly what she had hoped might become of it. So, make your way to the parade next year in honor of Juanita Edwards who passed away in 1996, and as she would want—HAVE FUN!


DRUID HILLS HOME & GARDEN TOUR 2022 - WOW!

April 29-May 1, 2022

 The Historic Druid Hills Home & Garden Tour was back this year after missing two seasons due to the pandemic. What a wonderful return we had with the most perfect weather! We couldn’t have asked for better. We featured twelve stunning homes, all of which are situated on streets on Olmsted's original plan for Druid Hills. Many meandered through our Olmsted Linear Park as they walked the tour - Olmsted himself would have been thrilled to see it! 

A HUGE thank you     to our gracious hosts who opened their jaw-dropping homes to us and all of the amazing volunteers that pulled this tour off. And, of course, none of it would have been possible without such wonderful support from our generous sponsors

We can’t forget to thank Kit Eisterhold who not only orchestrated the tour but also sponsored it. WOW! What a wonderful job you and the tour committee did! We're already planning for next year. If you are interested in being a part of this very special event, reach out to us!

AN EVENING OF MUSIC ON THE LAWN IN EMORY VILLAGE

April 30, 2022

Hundreds of music lovers of all ages converged on the grassy field in Emory Village on Saturday, April 30 to enjoy a balmy night and the music starring Atlanta folksinger Shawn Mullins and John Willingham and Friends. 

Singer-songwriter Mullins is best known for “Lullaby,” his 1998 chart-topping, Grammy-nominated hit from the platinum album Soul’s Core.

John Willingham & Friends, an acoustic trio with John, Nelson Nolen, and Mark Jones, opened the show with an eclectic mix of well-known songs from the past five decades.

Sponsors for the evening were Coca Cola, Engel and Voelkers, Acadia Shutters. Kit Eisterhold, Strategic Construction Services, Sunbeam Capital Management, Pogo Pictures, and Peggy Hibbert/Sotheby’s, and Tilting Windmill.

olmsted 200th birthday gala

April 26, 2022

After the spirited Olmsted 200 Tennis Tournament, which was hosted at Druid Hills Golf Club on Monday, friends and neighbors got the chance to get spiffed up in their finest for the beautiful Olmsted 200th Birthday Gala at Callanwolde on Tuesday! We celebrated more than just Olmsted's birthday - we celebrated having the chance to be together at a special event, once again.

Lots of delicious food by Zest, signature drinks, dancing to Joe Grandsden, seeing old friends and meeting new ones was the name of the evening. It couldn't have been more beautiful.

Our Shredding Event was a Huge Success! 

February 2022

The document shredding event, organized by the DHCA membership committee, went very smoothly. A total of 107 cars were processed thru the document shredding area. Once finished, the shredding truck was just about filled to capacity! All the shredded paper will be recycled into those brown paper napkins you see at food courts.

Hats off to the DHCA board and membership committee members, including some of their spouses who spent a Saturday working the event. A special thank you to Fernbank Elementary School for letting us use their school parking lots to host this community event.

Your Druid Hills Civic Association membership dues provided the funding for this event. Thank you for supporting the DHCA! If you haven’t renewed or are not a member, please consider joining so we can plan other great events!


HOLIDAY HOME DECORATING CONTEST

Druid Hills Holiday Home Decorating Contest Winner

December 2021

Thank you to everyone who nominated a home for our Druid Hills Holiday Home Decorating Contest!! We got a lot of great nominations, and some wonderful stories behind many of them. And although we had some FANTASTIC entries, there could only be one winner...

Congratulations to Perry Mitchell and Pam Woodley, of 1691 Ridgewood Dr! 

Perry and Pam will choose either a gold or bronze Druid Hills yard sign to display outside their home since they were the winning home!


Emory Village Alliance hosts the best Open Streets Event ever! 

October 2021

From awesome music and lots of activities for the kiddos to do, Open Streets Emory Village was a great time for all that attended. The Emory Village Alliance (EVA) hosted this annual event and once again provided a spectacular neighborhood festival for Druid Hills.

Our DHCA sponsored and organized the Halloween Parade & Costume Contest. It was definitely one of the highlights of the afternoon! The Druid Hills High School Marching Band and several of our community's elected officials led the parade thru Emory Village. We provided some great prizes to our costume winners, thanks to local businesses and residents. Thank you to everyone who helped organize this great event, and everyone that came out to enjoy it!

DHCA events are brought to you by our membership committee. We'd love more hands as we plan and execute more community activities like these! Email our membership director, Thea Roeser, to join this great committee.


CONTACT US

DRUID HILLS CIVIC ASSOCIATION
P.O. Box 363, Decatur, GA 30031

mail@druidhills.org
druidhills.org

©2020 Druid Hills Civic Association.  | Druid Hills Civic Association, Inc. is a Georgia non-profit corporation. 

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