The power of Pasaquan

Eddie Martin’s artful one-man monastery

BY JACKIE KENNEDY

At 6 feet, 2 inches tall, Eddie Owens Martin was an imposing figure in his colorful garb. (Photo by Jonathan Williams)

Near Buena Vista, along Highway 37 where multiple shades of green highlight the tree-lined route, you’d never imagine the wildly colorful, offbeat oddity that springs forth from a sandy ridge five miles from town. But the byway that leads you to it, Eddie Martin Road, offers a clue.

Eddie Owens Martin, or St. EOM, as he called himself, was the creator and caretaker of Pasaquan, his artful Marion County home. Colorful concrete creations meander across this self-made, one-man monastery that still sports vivid hues, although diminished somewhat in the 23 years since Martin’s death.

“There’s nothing like this place in the world,” says John Rogers, president of the Pasaquan Preservation Society. “To see what Martin did here shows the magnitude of his talent.”

For almost 30 years before he died in 1986, Martin toiled at turning his family homestead into a concrete compound of color, featuring religious symbols, human forms and starbursts sculpted into concrete walls creating pathways throughout the four-acre plot. At the compound’s center stands Martin’s home where paintings line the walls in each room, and hammer-pounded aluminum and beaded entries detail doorways. Martin crafted everything here.

A visionary artist respected as much for his architectural design as his art, St. EOM was an original, according to Buena Vista resident and writer Fred Fussell, who first met Martin in 1960 when he and high school friends visited Pasaquan to have their fortunes told. A decade later, Fussell returned, this time not as a teen seeking adventure but as an adult searching for relevant information from one of the century’s most intriguing artists.

From 1974 to 1986, Fussell, then curator of Columbus Museum, was a frequent visitor to Pasaquan.

“It was my job to pay attention to things that were happening in the Chattahoochee Valley region,” says Fussell. “And Eddie was a phenomenally creative person doing stuff no one else in the world was doing—and he was right here. What made him unique was how he concocted his own world view, based on a series of visions he’d had over the years.”

For 30 years, St. EOM worked to bring those visions to reality.

Known to his friends throughout Buena Vista as simply “Eddie,” Martin was born July 4, 1908, one of seven children in a sharecropper’s family. At 14, Martin ran away from home to New York City where he hustled, gambled and told fortunes for three decades. He lived in Greenwich Village, worked as a fortune-teller in Manhattan tea rooms, and spent his spare time soaking up the arts scene of the Big Apple’s many museums, libraries and art galleries, absorbing the customs of various cultures. In 1957, he returned to Georgia where he lived on a small farm inherited from his mother. He dubbed his new home Pasaquan.

Welcome to Pasaquan, home to the creations of Eddie Owens Martin. (Photo by Clayton Turner)

The voices led him to it, Martin would say.

The first of his extraordinary visions came in the late 1930s when three tall personages said they were from a future land called Pasaquan, “a place where the past, the present, the future and everything else all come together,” Martin explains in his 1985 biography, “St. EOM in the Land of Pasaquan,” by Tom Patterson. The visions and voices returned throughout his life, compelling Martin to create the futuristic haven known as Pasaquan. While building his legacy, he made a living by telling fortunes for $25 apiece and selling bead necklaces he strung himself.

In his hometown of Buena Vista, he was regarded sometimes with fear, sometimes with awe. When walking through town in his full regalia of bright robes, pants adorned with bells, beaded beard and straw hat trimmed in shells, children would run while the old folks shook their heads.

A character by every account, Martin was most at home at Pasaquan. “Here, I can be in my own world with my temples and designs and the spirit of God,” he told his biographer. “I don’t have nothin’ against other people and their beliefs. I’m not askin’ anybody to do my way or be my way. Although, when I’m dead and gone, they’ll follow like night follows day.”

Proof that the fortune-teller did have a knack for seeing into the future is the fact that people from all over the world continue to make the pilgrimage to Pasaquan. In recent years, Canadian TV and the British Broadcasting Corp. have filmed here. Visitors hail from Pennsylvania to Paris, and Martin’s pieces are held in collections in museums and galleries from Los Angeles to New York City and in between.

“This place represents someone with a unique vision and how he manifested it,” says Will Polk, with the Pasaquan Preservation Society. “People are interested in that sort of personality, and Pasaquan is the epitome of that.”

Floria Yancey displays her work during Artist Day at Pasaquan in 2007. (Photo by Clayton Turner)

The Pasaquan Preservation Society works to secure funds to preserve St. EOM’s creation. The Flint Energies (electric co-op based in Reynolds) Foundation granted the society two cash gifts totaling $8,000, seed money that enabled the group to make repairs at Pasaquan, which had long sat dormant, and open it to the public. A $10,000 Georgia Heritage Grant is earmarked for a restoration master plan. Hands-on work began last summer, shortly after St. EOM’s 100th birthday was recognized on July 4. A celebration was held to honor the independence of two one-of-a-kinds—America and Eddie Martin.

Preserving Pasaquan is important, according to Fussell.

“Pasaquan is an instrument for educating and inspiring the American public with regard to the capacity of an individual to produce eminently significant achievements through personal acts of innovation, diligence and vision,” he says, speaking of Pasaquan, the place.

Eddie Martin, the man?

“My impression then was the same as it is now,” Fussell concludes. “He was really weird—but in a good way.”

—Jackie Kennedy is a freelance writer living in LaGrange.