Fermata Folklore
- Katey Rich
- Dec 1
- 6 min read
Updated: Dec 2
It had been 60 years since the Fermata School for Girls last taught the daughters of America’s finest families about everything they’d need to know to enter high society, from cooking to horseback riding. But on monthly weeknights in the late ’90s, in that wide wood and stucco gymnasium that had once been state of the art, I was still there being taught the foxtrot and the waltz.
The Fermata Club, for me, was the home of Social, the program that still teaches ballroom dancing and manners to Aiken and Augusta’s middle schoolers. It was also the home of swim team, its pool deck the origin of the scar still faint on my left hand. For my parents it was the venue for monthly parties thrown with their friends, and before that an annual Pink Cadillac party that came complete with custom T-shirts. For generations of Aikenites it’s been a place to cut loose, to reunite, to roast an oyster or sneak a kiss.
None of us, I don’t think, thought much about the building’s origin as part of a school for wealthy girls in the fading days of the Winter Colony. But that’s the thing about growing up in Aiken: there’s usually history right beneath your feet, whether you’re aware of it or not.
Before there was the Fermata Club, there was Tall Pines. The June 22, 1905, edition of The Aiken Recorder reported that “Mr Anthony R. Kuser of New Jersey is about to build a very handsome residence on the tract of land bought a few years ago by Mr. J.F. Dryden at the entrance of the golf grounds.” Construction was expected to cost $25,000 and be completed by the year’s end.
The connection between Kuser and Dryden, the founder of what is now the Prudential Insurance Company, was a personal one — Kuser was Dryden’s son-in-law, having married his daughter Susie in 1896. By 1905 both men were the kind of prominent Northeastern businessmen drawn south as the Winter Colony began its remarkable reign.
The more you learn about Kuser, the more you realize how few degrees of separation he creates between Aiken and the great institutions of America. For example: in 1915, when he was probably still spending a lot of time in Aiken, Kuser lent $200,000 to William Fox to establish the Fox Film Corporation — now 20th Century, the studio behind film classics from “Dr. Dolittle” to “Avatar.”
Another example: Kuser’s daughter-in-law was Brooke Russell, later known as Brooke Astor, who lived until the age of 105 as one of the last remaining icons of this Gilded Age. Tall Pines was just one of several homes owned by the Kuser family, and it’s hard to know why it became one of the less essential; when Kuser died in 1929, it was at a different winter retreat in Florida. What we do know is that by 1921 the Kuser family was willing to sell — and the new Tall Pines residents would not be the buyers, but the girls they were planning to educate.
“So many things in this life have changed,” said Marie Eustis Hoffmann, nicknamed “Mariquita,” in a 1953 interview, decades after the glory days of the Winter Colony and her school for girls. “But these woods never change.”
Looking out at Hitchcock Woods as she spoke, Marie was living in the gardener’s cottage of what had once been her family home with world-renowned pianist Josef Hofmann, based near the southern end of Laurens Street (where the Hitchcock Apartments now stand). A cousin of Lulie Hitchcock, one of the great driving forces who established the Winter Colony, Marie was looking for a school for her daughter on par with the boys-only Aiken Preparatory School, which Lulie had founded in 1916. Beginning in October 1919 the Fermata School for Girls operated out of the third floor of the Hofmann home, with five students and a whopping 22 instructors. “A dietitian came in to instruct the girls in the preparation of meals,” Marie explained in that 1953 interview. “And there were riding instructors from the outside, and art instructors.”
These girls were presumably raised with impeccable manners, but it’s still easy to imagine the chaos that ensued in the Hofmann household, and Marie seemed to have a sense of humor about it. She remembered one evening when a student was serving her family dinner, and “in bringing in eggs to prepare in a chafing dish, she dropped two dozen of them on our dining room rug. We had a hilarious time cleaning up the mess.”
In 1921 Marie, whose marriage to Hofmann was beginning to collapse, partnered with Hope Goddard Iselin to purchase Tall Pines and expand Fermata. By the end of the decade the school had 70 boarding students and 20 more day students.
“The only remaining big event of the Aiken season is the Fermata School Horse Show,” proclaimed The New York Times in an April 5, 1931, article titled “Resorts Take On Fresh Gayety.” “There are always a number of fine horses entered and almost all of the more than eighty girls at the school will participate in the many classes.”
The most famous Fermata graduate, however, is most likely now Rebekah Harkness — a.k.a. the Rebekah “who rode up on the afternoon train” in Taylor Swift’s song “the last great american dynasty.” Harkness was the previous owner of Swift’s Rhode Island beach house, and her exploits described in the song — filling a pool with champagne, dyeing a neighbor’s pet green — are truly only the beginning. She composed a tone poem performed at Carnegie Hall. She befriended the most famous yogi in the world. When she died in 1982, her urn was designed by Salvador Dali!
The Fermata School, like the marriage between Marie and Josef Hofmann, was not destined to last. The school closed in 1941, and shortly after that a fire destroyed most of Tall Pines, save a few buildings including the gymnasium that still stands today. But by then Aiken was on the verge of the most massive change in its history — one that would eventually open the exclusive doors of Fermata and make it a true Aiken icon..
If you had to pick the exact spot where the Aiken Winter Colony gives way to the modern era, it’s somewhere around the entrance to the Fermata Club on Whiskey Road. The construction of the Savannah River Plant (now Savannah River Site) in 1952 turned Whiskey into a “principal artery leading to the atomic energy plant,” as Kay Lawrence wrote in her 1971 book “Heroes, Horses, and High Society” (which also includes the Marie Eustis Hofmann interview). “Traffic whizzed by the rows of magnolias and the beautiful vine-covered walls which had once insured complete privacy for the residents.”
The Fermata School buildings on Whiskey stood empty back then, but some of those new arrivals — “the DuPonters,” as old Aiken types still call them — had an idea. Sixteen families teamed up to lease and eventually purchase the land, and by the end of the summer of 1952 there were 116 families forming what’s still the Fermata Club.
Founded as a space for the daughters of the elite, the Fermata Club has spent the past 70 years welcoming so much more of the community. Jason Rabun, until recently the chair of Fermata’s Board of Directors, was never a member as a child, but remembers being there for “birthday parties, social events, school dances, and oyster roasts.” Like me he went there for Social, and like me his parents and their friends seem to have had an even better time: “my favorite stories come from my parents' friends about the parties they used to attend and host, reminiscent of a supper club.”
Rabun has been leading the charge to sell the Fermata Club to a group of private investors; the sale was approved by Fermata’s membership in late June, but won’t be finalized until later this year. Damaged by a fire in 2023, the iconic Fermata Hall cannot legally be occupied — though thanks to Rabun I got to take a peek inside, and it looks almost exactly as I remember it, for good (those original wooden floors!) and bad (those crummy 1950s bathrooms!). Rabun notes that there have been no major improvements to the interior of the clubhouse since the private club first began, and though there’s a lot of nostalgia in that tiny kitchen stuffed behind the stage, there’s a lot of potential for something bigger, too.
Fermata, named by the music-loving Hofmann family, means to pause or to rest. The Fermata Club pool is still lively and the tennis courts still hard at work, but the historic building is in its own moment of pause — waiting for the music to start again.
Update for online article, the Fermata Club members decided in a vote to remain a private club in early 2025.
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