“Everybody’s looking for the Garden of Eden,” says Lee Epting. “You’re not gonna find it. But if you’re lucky you’ll get little glimpses of it.”
For Epting, a master party-thrower and the founder of Epting Events, it’s all about creating a memory and a feeling that his clients can keep for the rest of their lives. And this mentality, paired with a keen attention to aesthetics and genuine hospitality, is reflected from his business to his own kitchen table.
Epting has been catering unofficially since his time managing fraternity house kitchens in college. When people came into town, he would arrange a party.
“I didn’t know it was called catering then,” he chuckles as he checks on cornbread and country ham warming in the fireplace. “I started not cooking but giving parties, entertaining people. The whole essence of what we do now is making people happy. That’s the business I went into.”
These days, Epting Events throws at least one wedding every week and up to seven over a weekend in the spring. Many of these celebrations are held on Epting’s own land, The Hill.
The Hill is only four miles outside of downtown Athens, Ga., but driving up the gravel path to what Epting calls his “orphanage for old homes” feels like another world.
For more than 40 years, Epting has cultivated and curated his property to pay homage to an era that has long since passed. The property was originally divided into the Phinizy and Gillian Plantations. When Epting’s grandparents lost their Prince Avenue home after the Depression, they purchased the Gillian Plantation and moved out to the country.
“Thank goodness,” Epting says, reflecting on his ancestor’s move. To this day he feels a deep sense of relief to be coming home when he pulls onto the land.
The yellow house that Epting calls his home was hauled to The Hill from Williamston, SC. It was a family home built in 1785. As he pieced the transported home together room by room, he saved the heart of the home, the kitchen, to be from an 1830’s home from Athens. The small rock house out front was built in the 1920’s by a grandson of the slave that originally inherited the Phinizy plantation, the half of the land that Epting first acquired. Everyone in the family has lived in that small house.
Epting is a man of full intention in every endeavor, a set designer and historian in many ways. At The Hill, he has crafted a space that honors the abundance of the South—from the region’s handmade furniture and art that fill the houses to native fruit trees and a seasonal garden that dot the land. Even the structures themselves were collected from different Southern states and restored. The people that move out to The Hill appreciate dirt roads, and Epting is very protective of that.
He’s creating a living museum, although he wouldn’t want you to call it that. Nothing lingers on a shelf collecting dust. Each room has a sense of place, both in history and in the present. He uses the collection of artifacts and antiques that decorate his historical home to preserve an old way of life and to share it with a modern age.
As lunchtime approaches, Epting heats a cast iron pan on the stove, grinds a few pepper pods with a pestle and gingerly turns a piece of battered steak with a hand-carved wood-handled fork and knife.
“It gives me great pleasure to turn the meat with that fork. It’s got a little style to it. It’s got a story to it,” he says. “I don’t know if it tastes any better, but it just feels good.”
Polished sterling silver and fine china are for everyday use in this home. This breathes new life into them. So do the people who come to share in Epting’s own personal Eden.
“When [these homes were] built, it was a lonely time. We weren’t industrialized, we weren’t up north, we weren’t cities,” Epting says as he removes his worn gardener’s hat. “You know, in the South we were rural. Plantation to plantation or just farm to farm was a long ways away, so when people came, you had to feed them.”
Epting treasures the opportunity to bring people into his realm whom he would otherwise never meet. He never holds back when given the chance to share his life and resources with a passerby rumbling up the drive or with a bride and her groom on the day that means the most. He indulges in the chance for conversation and the ability to feed.
“No one wants to live exactly how I live,” Epting says. “It’s cold in [this house], and the smoke does get in, and the wind does blow through the place. No one wants to live that way all the time, but they love to experience that just for just a little while.”
Story by Erin Wilson
Photographs by Paige French