Home Feature: The Huffman House

By Erica O’Neal

Managing Editor

Pulling up into the half-circle gravel driveway, a beautiful white 19th century Classical Greek Revival home sits just behind a large Magnolia tree. The house was built in 1856 and is currently owned by a couple originally from Indianapolis, MaryAnn and Gary Huffman. 

The home sits on 12 acres with a screened-in pool in the backyard and a barn in the fenced-in backfields. The house has eight fireplaces, five and a half bathrooms and five bedrooms. Altogether there are nine rooms in the home. 

The couple moved down to Cordele in October 2011 after looking around at a few other houses around Lake Blackshear and up in Chicago. MaryAnn’s husband had two job offers in both Albany and Chicago. 

“We had lived in historic homes before and I said ‘I think if we ever moved down there, I’d like to find an old house with a big front porch.’ None of the homes around the lake were like that. Maybe a month later he was still interviewing with both companies, he called me and said ‘I want you to look at this house.’” MaryAnn says. 

They looked at eight other houses in the area the same day they looked at that home, and decided they wanted it right away. 

“When it comes to historic homes, I’m kind of a purist. I don’t really want to change a lot of things that are original to the house. So I haven’t moved rooms or anything like that. One of the beautiful things about this house is that it’s not really been changed very much in all of those years,” MaryAnn explains.

Over the last century and a half since it was built, previous owners had to add in the kitchen and bathrooms. Indoor plumbing and electricity had not been invented yet when the house was originally built. 

The home originally had a wrap-around porch, but over the years, previous owners had built walls on the left side, filling in one side of the porch. The room created is now used as a formal dining room and has a marble fireplace. 

MaryAnn and Gary added matching crown moldings and baseboards to all of the rooms as well as replacing the outside sidings.

“A couple of years ago the siding was really bad on the house. We had a problem with the bees; there were enormous hives inside the walls, like five feet tall. So we had to tear the siding off the house to get to those hives and get those hives out of there. That’s when we decided to put Hardie board on the outside,” MaryAnn says.

Hardie side panels are more resistant to moisture, damage from mold, are non-combustible and helps cut down on some of the maintenance of the home.

The kitchen behind the dining room has marble countertops, and a silver-plated backsplash along with tile flooring and a hanging pot rack above a cooking island in the center. 

The homeowners have three grown children, and three of the upstairs bedrooms are themed for each one of the children for when they come home to visit. Two of them moved down to the South Georgia area to be near their parents. 

Through one of the upstairs bedrooms, MaryAnn has her office where she works on her interior design work and runs her home accessories business called Friends. The office has a door leading outside to a private porch overlooking the front yard. The office offers plenty of space and light for focusing and getting work done.

Downstairs, through the back door of the kitchen is the screen-enclosed pool area. When the weather is good, MaryAnn and her husband Gary spend much of their time eating at the table next to the pool and preparing meals at the outdoor kitchen area. 

Just outside of the screened-in pool area is a veranda with a pond where the homeowners keep a little over a dozen Koi fish. Frogs and other small aquatic wildlife take up refuge there. 

Looking out at the field beyond, there’s a two-stall red barn with white trim. The barn houses two horses and a donkey that wander in and out of the barn as they please. MaryAnn and Gary had the barn built after moving into the home, and ensured it was built to look like it belonged there. They used old church doors and stained glass windows to give it a unique look. 

Above the two-car garage, there’s an upstairs loft area furnished for guests to stay. The loft has a mini-kitchen and a half-bathroom along with plenty of cozy spots to curl up with a book. 

Behind the garage, there’s a chicken coop and a tool shed that came with the house when they bought it. The chicken coop had to be rebuilt because it was rotting out at the time the current homeowners purchased the house. One room is for their dozen or so chickens to roost, and the other room has windows to be able to easily collect the laid eggs. 

The homeowners have made it a priority to preserve as much of the original pieces of the house as they can. The windows for example, many are still the original hand-blown glass. MaryAnn and Gary added storm windows over top of the original panes of glass to help with insulation. 

Lake Blackshear Executive Chef, Matt Lamb

By Erica O’Neal

Managing Editor

“I like to take Southern food, different items that people eat in the South and make them together and do a fusion with them,” Executive Chef, Matthew Lamb explains while standing in Lake Blackshear Resort’s kitchen.

Matt is cooking his favorite dish on the menu: peach and sweet tea pork chop. 

“A lot of people grow up eating pork with applesauce, which was a big thing when I was a kid so what I did was I took a bone and pork chop and we made a sweet tea sauce. We reduce sweet tea, make a caramel out of it almost and sauté Georgia peaches into it and pour it over the pork chop. We ran it as a special for a couple of weeks and we couldn’t keep it. We sold out every time we put it on there,” Matt says.

The pork chop is now on the menu and will most likely continue for a while. Lake Blackshear Resort hired Matt Lamb a little over a year ago. Previous to accepting the job at Lake Blackshear, Matt was cooking at a country club in Albany where he had been trying his hand at dishes of his creation for the last five years.

Matt hails from Albany and currently lives there with his wife and three children. His love for cooking began when he was a child. 

“I grew up with my grandparents on weekends, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother and granddad. On Sundays we’d always have family eat at the church, so it was fun for me to help my grandmother cook and prep on Saturdays to help cook for Sundays. I grew up doing that and as I got older I started doing it myself, cooking for my mom, my sister and that kind of stuff. I just got kind of good at it,” Matt says.

Matt graduated from Cordon Bleu in Orlando in April 2007. Matt chose the Orlando campus because he wanted to take pastry classes that were only offered in Orlando. 

Before deciding to go to school, Matt began working at Wendy’s making burgers and worked his way up to chain restaurants like Outback. It wasn’t until he attended Cordon Bleu that Matt had the chance to experiment and get creative with dishes.

After graduating, Matt worked at a hotel kitchen in California. Matt moved back to Albany after the hotel burned down from wildfires and spent a brief amount of time in Tallahassee, Fla.

“My granddad passed away so I came back and went to work on the oilrigs. I cooked on oilrigs for almost two years. That was a whole different experience. A friend of mine took the head chef position at Stone Bridge Country Club in Albany and called me and said ‘listen I really need some help getting this place back in order.’” Matt says.

Matt initially thought he would only stay with the country club for about six months, but instead the job turned into five and a half years.

“Being at the country club, it helped me expand what I could do. It helped bring out the talent I didn’t know I had, because I’d never had the opportunity to experiment with anybody out of culinary school, I’d never had the opportunity in a place of employment to just practice on stuff and make stuff that wasn’t already on the menu. So now I can do that there, they would say ‘make us a menu’ and I just got to play with items, so it helped me grow into being able to make a wide variety of stuff and making things people hadn’t seen before. It taught me a lot,” Matt says. 

As Executive Chef at the resort, Matt manages two restaurants, Cordelia’s and Cypress Grill. Matt also organizes banquets held at the resort and plans meals for groups who stay for events or business conferences. There is a board hanging on the wall in the kitchen, which maps out what meals needs to be prepped for next and what time events are happening.

“It’s not just the same thing over and over every day. It’s a challenge so my brain is always working to make sure that things are going right for each group,” Matt explains.

Matt attributes the success of the kitchen to his staff, especially his Sous Chef, Christy Paul. Christy has been working at Lake Blackshear Resort for 10 years and helps to catch anything Matt might have missed. 

General Manager of Lake Blackshear Resort, Jason Smith is glad to have Matt leading the way. 

“We’re fortunate to have Chef Lamb on the team. He’s been here for just over 14 months now and has done a terrific job in updating the quality of the cuisine. The dynamic specials that are offered here on a daily basis are all his creation, he and his culinary staff. He’s dedicated to changing the menu on a frequent basis in order to accommodate new tastes, themes, and what’s trending in the marketplace. One of the most important considerations here, when you look at our menu at the items that are noted as Georgia grown,” Smith says.

Some of the food items brought in locally are the peaches, goat cheese and rib eye, which are all Georgia grown. The goat cheese is from Silly Goat Farms in Tifton and the bone and rib eye are from Degraan Farms.

“He’s very proud of searching for and identifying locally sourced products. Not only meats, but the vegetables and fruits which play an important role in his menu development,” Smith comments.

Matt is constantly modifying the menu, and has done so three or four times in the last year he has been working as Executive Chef. 

“It’s stressful sometimes but fun. I get home at the end of the day and feel like ‘we did it.’ That’s what I like about it,” Matt says. 

Crisp County Woman Fire Fighter

By Erica O’Neal

Managing Editor

Leaning back against the bright-red fire truck, Sabrina Reuda smiles and attempts to smooth away wisps of her hair. Sabrina has been working part-time as a fire fighter with Crisp County Fire Rescue for the last eight months. Sabrina is 24-years-old and started out volunteering as a fire fighter with Sumter County in order to help others.

“Just the need to help the community around me. This was the first course of action I took and I fell in love with it immediately so I’ve stuck with it. I didn’t have plans ahead of time to do this. I got my GED when I turned 22 and as soon as I got my GED I went straight to the station in Sumter County and picked up a volunteer packet. Once I started my classes and everything, I just stuck with it since then,” Sabrina said.

Sabrina has been a fire fighter for two years now and does not see a time in the future when she would not be working to save lives. So far Sabrina has worked multiple structure fires in Sumter County and a few smaller fires in Crisp County. Sabrina remembers the first fire she fought with Sumter County not long after passing exams and receiving her certifications. A propane tank had blown at a residence and when Sumter County Fire Department received the call, a notification was sent out to all volunteers via pagers.

“I followed one of the engines down to the house that was on fire and I parked down the road, but as soon as I stepped out I could feel the heat every time it (the propane tank) released the pressure that was built up in it. You could hear it and you could feel it from all the way down the road. I went and got my gear on and I ran down the road to where everyone was. You could see the fire, it was going so high in the air, it was catching the trees on fire, the shed that was by it was burning up, the vehicles on the inside, the motorcycles, part of the structure was catching on fire,” Sabrina said.

Once the fire was knocked down, Sabrina described how she helped with overhaul, which means fire fighters made sure to go back and hit any hot spots or debris. As they worked, Sabrina remembers picking up small pieces of the lives that lived in the home.

“Me and some of the other fighters as we were going, we were looking down and collecting picture frames, bibles and books that we could find, anything that we could salvage out of it and giving it all to the owner of the house because, when they lose something like that, anything you can save is precious. So that was my first experience. Anything you can salvage to give back, it may look like a little but it means a lot to the people who are receiving it. So it was a good experience,” Sabrina said.

Sabrina moved over to Crisp County Fire Rescue after hearing about it from friends who worked in both Sumter County Fire Department and Crisp County Fire Rescue. Sabrina no longer works for Sumter County, but now works two jobs: part-time at Crisp County and part-time as a machine operator at Tape Specialist of Georgia in Americus as well as volunteering with another county.

According to Sabrina, fire stations around the country have only a handful of full-time paid fire fighters and the rest are trained volunteers. Each volunteer has to go through rigorous training sessions and exams. After being certified, volunteer fire fighters are given a pager to notify when a fire is occurring and their own fire fighting gear. Sabrina makes sure to have her gear stored away in her personal vehicle in case of a fire notification. This way she can respond immediately without having to swing by a station to pick up her gear. 

Sumter County Fire Department and Crisp County Fire Rescue are two completely different experiences as far as how they are structured. Sumter County Fire Department is a relatively new department, it’s only been around for about nine years since 2009, whereas Crisp County Fire Rescue is much older and has more seasoned fire fighters. 

“Being that Sumter County is very fresh, very new, they are very trained-oriented and very big on teaching and learning and bringing people in and out. Here in Crisp County, it’s older; everyone here is experienced so it’s not so much as drilling in everything that you need to learn because a lot of them know it. You ask questions as you go. The differences you find, not only with the people but the rankings are a little different. It’s all basically the same, the command structures are basically the same, just a little different,” Sabrina said.

Sabrina balances being a mother to a five-year-old named Catherine as well as working part-time as a fire fighter and part-time as a machine operator. Her husband, David Reuda is a police officer with the Americus Police Department. 

“She loves the fact of what I do. She loves the concept of the Fire Department and firefighters. I’m with her a lot. One day she’ll want to be a fire fighter, the next day she’ll want to be a cop,” Sabrina said.

Sabrina has found her passion and envisions herself serving the community as a fire fighter for years to come.