PERRY — Inside the once-abandoned, 1950s-era Pure Oil service station that Beth Cleveland has transformed into a bustling coffee shop, she recently noticed a young woman who was new in town.
The owner of Morning by Morning Coffee Company has gotten used to greeting faces old and new since opening the doors five years ago. It isn’t uncommon for former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn or ABC News journalist Deborah Roberts, who both grew up in Perry, to pop in when they’re in town. The young woman, though, had moved here all the way from California.
Perry straddles a long, largely remote stretch of I-75 between Macon and Valdosta. The Georgia National Fairgrounds & Agricenter with its massive clock tower pack a visual wallop to passersby headed to or from Florida. But what is most notable, perhaps, is what is happening beyond the highway’s hum.
The city’s population has almost doubled since 2010, to nearly 25,000, riding a broader wave of growth in Houston County, where tracts of farmland are becoming subdivisions and multi-acre estates.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
The Middle Georgia county has grown twofold since 1990, anchored by Robins Air Force Base, which employs more than 20,000 people.
But Perry has built something that Warner Robins, its larger neighbor a bit more than 10 miles to the north, does not have — a traditional downtown district.
Fifteen years ago, there were few restaurants in downtown Perry. Today, about a mile from the freeway, increasingly upscale coffee shops, eateries and boutiques dot the roughly six-block downtown, turning it into the county’s de facto town square.
“A long time ago, if you were in a town, you shopped in that town and you went to church and you did everything in a certain area. Then that all started changing. People were going to Macon and driving to Atlanta,” Cleveland, the coffee shop owner, said.
Now, she said, “Perry stays in Perry.”
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Some locals have adopted a new nickname for the 200-year-old county seat as it experiences a rebirth.
“We call it ‘Perry-dise,’” said Mike Tomlin, who owns Clover, a wine shop he opened in August 2020 during the pandemic.
He says business has been brisk ever since, with patrons from Macon and points half an hour or more south.
“I think the city is doing everything right. They’re not rushing anything,” Tomlin said. “You walk down the streets, the little detail, from the plants on the lampposts. … I don’t have a total answer of what right is, but they’re really going about things the right way.”
‘It was a risk’
Twenty years ago, a restaurateur who bought the landmark New Perry Hotel described the city as “a gold mine waiting to happen.”
She, it seems, was a little early. The hotel was recently demolished.
In 2008, when another entrepreneur, Megan Brent, opened a pioneering downtown catering business and eatery, Perfect Pear, the streets were still very quiet.
A couple of years later, Perry developed a strategic plan “to remain viable” and be “sought after as a community,” said Mayor Randall Walker.
A big part of the plan was to bring more people downtown, where a venerable grid of old brick buildings with storefronts was going unused or occupied by insurance agents and accountants.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
A small but growing number of merchants hosted get-togethers, from wine crawls to food-truck nights to, on New Year’s Eve, an annual “buzzard drop.” The city’s annual Dogwood Festival also helped, as did its proximity to the national fair.
Today, festivals and other events, some at the fairgrounds, draw anywhere from 8,000 to 15,000 people, according to the mayor. And downtown is usually busy.
“We’re an overnight success, but it took 15 years,” said Brent, whose lunch- and Sunday-brunch spot serves up burgers, salads, crab cakes, quiche and her locally renowned pimento cheese-and-bacon sandwiches.
One of downtown’s newest eateries, Ghost Runner Pizza, opened last June, after brothers Wade and Cody Walker began with pop-up sales and baking pizza at home.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
“It was a risk. And this is not the pizza shop that people are used to,” said Wade, noting that for many years Perry residents relied on chain restaurants, most of them packed close to the interstate.
The brothers have taken a small-steps approach. They’re open Thursday through Sunday, evenings only.
But Walker, the mayor, who is not related to the brothers, said there wasn’t a parking space to be found in a part of downtown on a recent Wednesday night. A decade ago, he added, you could’ve stood in the same spot and not seen anyone. Back then, “If you needed help, you couldn’t have found it.”
‘A place of serenity’
People don’t just come for a quick coffee or meal, as the near doubling of Perry’s population shows.
Some Warner Robins residents are moving here for newer housing, more space and the traditional old-town vibes. Others from farther afield.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Air Force veteran Jason Butts and his wife moved back to his native Houston County last fall from St. Marys on Georgia’s coast. They were the first to lease one of the new loft apartments at a development in the shadows of the downtown water tower.
“When I was a kid, Perry was a place you didn’t really go and visit,” said the Air Force veteran, who graduated from Warner Robins High School. “Because there really wasn’t much there.”
The couple were drawn to the new activity downtown and the city’s walkability. His wife, Tosha, who grew up across the Flint River in Taylor County, recently took a stroll on a trail along Big Indian Creek.
”You felt like you were in the middle of the woods, but you were in the middle of town,” she said. “It was peaceful. … You didn’t have to go far to get to a place of serenity.”
The growth has been bolstered by one of the best public school systems in the region. Perry High School’s football Panthers won their first-ever state championship in 2023, in a county where neighboring Northside and Warner Robins High have been perennial powerhouses.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
The Air Force base isn’t the only big employer around here. Giant snack-maker Frito-Lay has its largest U.S. manufacturing facility just outside Perry, and announced a $200 million expansion in 2020. A Jack Link’s plant is slated to open this summer, bringing some 400 new jobs, part of a $450 million investment announced in 2022.
With the rise of remote work in the wake of the pandemic, more people also can choose to live farther from the bigger cities that are home to more employers. The option of telecommuting has made not just Perry more desirable, but the lower agricultural third of Houston County to the south of it.
The city also has laid out the welcome mat for retirees, attracting people from as close as Warner Robins but also Floridians tired of the tropical weather and often-heavy traffic. Every time a hurricane hits Florida, a former mayor once joked, Perry’s population grows.
Perry home prices were up 5.4% in February from the same month last year, selling for a median price of $299,000, according to real estate company Redfin. That’s less than Atlanta, where the median price was closer to $400,000, but more than in Warner Robins, where it was just under $250,000.
‘Like a time capsule’
James Farmer, a bestselling author and interior designer, opened his storefront a decade ago.
Farmer, who Atlanta magazine once dubbed “the nation’s next lifestyle guru. … Think Martha Stewart — but with a drawl and a plaid shirt,” grew up in Perry and went to Auburn University.
When people there asked him where in Georgia he was from, he gently informed them that there was “a world outside of Atlanta.”
“You can live well in Perry,” Farmer said. “We’re two hours from Atlanta, two hours and change from the coast. We can be in so many places in such a short amount of time.”
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
He thinks a lot of people who retired to Warner Robins missed a traditional downtown and are drawn to Perry’s more Southern feel. “There’s not the sentimentality or nostalgia of a small town, and Perry offered that. And it’s in the same county. So you didn’t really have to move.”
Perry, he adds, “is kind of like a time capsule that got rediscovered, that got dug up.”
Farmer has more than 135,000 followers on Instagram, but he chooses to stay here.
He opened his eponymous shop in what was a Christian book store, one where his late grandfather, a well-known Baptist preacher in the area, took him as a child and bought one of Farmer’s first Bibles, embossed with his name.
“It’s Mayberry,” he said, “without being Mayberry.”
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