Uphill Climb To Success  Siblings built Forrest Hills resort by hand, word of mouth

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Here in Northeast Georgia about five miles from Amicalola Falls is a place where dreams can come true.

The road leading here is a nice two-lane blacktop. Sometimes it flows between green hills covered with cows, and sometimes it rolls through a forest. Many miles do not have a visible utility line, making the road and pastures with their perfectly lined fences the only signs of mankind.

Here, Forrest Hills Mountain Resort is a good example of what can happen when flatlanders decide to live in the mountains. It's also a good example of how an off-hand remark can create dedicated new business people.

It was more than 30 years ago in West Palm Beach, Fla., that Frank Kraft said: "Well, kids, we own 140 acres in the mountains. What are we gonna do?"

He had mortgaged his Florida home to buy the property; it was the mid-1970s, and other families had gone broke trying to create mountain resorts. He went to banks in Dahlonega and West Palm Beach to get money, but no luck.

Later, two of his children, Denise, age 19, and David, age 17, came to the mountains and began building the resort themselves. They gave little thought to the fact that they had no experience, no electricity and no telephone.

Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone were David's heroes, and Denise had wanted to live in a mountain cabin since she first came through Northeast Georgia at age 6. In Lumpkin County, they worked long days and long months to make their dreams come true.

Much later a friend described their accomplishments well when he said to David: "I know why you can do so much. You have never thought that you couldn't."

It was winter, and much had occurred by the time a fine car carrying two strangers surprised the brother and sister on a snowy Sunday afternoon.

Darlene Kraft, the mother, said the family's new resort should be called Forrest Hills, spelling forest with two "Rs" so that the divided word was "for rest." Years later, Forrest Hills Mountain Resort was named among the top 10 best resorts in the nation by Hospitality Magazine.

Today, well known people from around Georgia and elsewhere regularly spend time here. If asked, David and Denise will tell the guests about their early experiences.

"It's fun to tell about it, because it helps us relive it," Denise said.

Their enthusiasm and love for Forrest Hills is obvious in their faces as they talk. It's also obvious in the decors of the different cabins, the conference center, board room, wedding gazebos, horse paddocks, flower beds, ballroom and walkways. Everywhere.

A few years ago, an older Forrest Hills employee, who had already retired from another job, was asked why she came here every day to work for minimum wage. She said, "I'm here because I want to see what's going to happen next."

But let's start back at the beginning.

A neighbor's inheritance

It was the mid '70s, and the Krafts' neighbor in West Palm Beach learned that he was among 17 heirs of an estate in Lumpkin County. The heirs lived all over the United States and planned a brief reunion on the property before auctioning it off.

The man asked Kraft to help him make the long 700-mile drive up U.S. 441 and Ga. 9 to the property.

At the auction, the heirs refused the highest bid of $34,000. On the spur of the moment, Kraft said, "Well, I'll give you $50,000 for this property," and his offer was accepted.

Back in West Palm Beach on the following Monday, Kraft received a letter from the closing bank in Dahlonega saying that if the money wasn't received by the next day at noon, the deal was off. Kraft caught a plane, rented a car in Atlanta and was at the bank before noon on Tuesday with the money.

He was an electrical engineer and could not abandon his long-time job with Florida Power & Light. He and Darlene had four children. Stephen and Denise already had graduated from high school, David was about to graduate, and Michele still had several years to go.

David had helped his father and others build additions to their homes. At his high school graduation ceremony on a June evening in 1977, he got his diploma, got in a large rented truck where his packed suitcase was waiting, and left West Palm Beach never to return.

Denise, who had just graduated from junior college, followed him, driving David's old straight-shift pickup. David had never driven such a large truck before, and Denise had tried driving a straight shift the first time two days earlier.

The copperhead

The Kraft brother and sister moved into the only building on the property, a home almost 100 years old. Earlier on a family walk of the property, they had met the elderly woman of the house when she came onto the front porch spitting tobacco juice and pointing a shotgun at them.

They believed the story they heard about a copperhead rattler dying after it bit the man of the house because he "was full of moonshine."

The Kraft family name immediately created suspicion among the Lumpkin neighbors who thought they bought the land for pulpwood. Rome Kraft Paper Mill, now Inland Paperboard and Packaging, already owned much of the adjoining land.

Father Kraft kept applying for loans, but bank officers didn't like the idea of a boy and girl, not yet legal adults, doing all the construction work.

After he learned that a nearby lumber yard sent out invoices on the 25th of each month and asked for payment within the next 30 days, he ordered lumber delivered to Forrest Hills on the 26th. That way, they would have 60 days to pay the bill.

Denise and David, who had grown up beside a canal in West Palm Beach, now were alone in a ghostly old house in a Georgia mountain forest. At night they could hear the well bucket going down into the water, hear the windlass cranking it back up again and hear water dripping back into the well. They would look out into the darkness but could see no one at the well.

Another sound heard during the nights was a thump, thump, thump across the old floor. Later a man came to the house and asked if the former couple had left anything. He was told, "Only a peg leg up in the attic." It had belonged to an uncle who lost a leg in the war, the man said, before he took it away. The midnight thumping in the house wasn't heard again.

They dug holes in the ground for septic tanks and foundation pillars made of cement blocks. The lumber yard sent them wet pine planks dripping with resin, and construction began.

"I remember exactly where I drove the first nail, and it bent," David said with a laugh.

They dammed up the small creek for personal bathing, and their meals were made of nuts and legume sprouts. It was sprouts and nuts, called "gorp," at breakfast, peanut butter added at lunch for "yuk," and "gross," at dinner or at anytime that gorp and yuk was eaten the third time in a day.

"We were the healthiest we've ever been," Denise said.

Every two weeks, Father Kraft came up from Florida and took them to a restaurant, such as the Smith House in Dahlonega, for dinner. There they gorged on vegetables.

Their father also brought them movies, "Popeye," "Coal Miner's Daughter," "The Jerk," and more. Every evening, they were able to view them with a laser disc player, despite the fact that plugging something into the house's one outlet caused it to buzz. Eventually they had memorized every line, and they still may laugh and repeat one of the lines now if the situation fits.

Summer passed, autumn came, then winter. Construction is slow when only two people are doing the work with a gasoline-powered chain saw, hand saws, hand drills and a couple of hammers. When a level was needed to gauge the accuracy of their work, they used a clear plastic pipe filled with water.

David's old straight shift truck was used to get supplies, and when the starter quit, they began parking it on a hill. Then the clutch went out; then the brakes went out.

"Luckily, Dahlonega didn't have stop signs back then, and we could use the emergency brakes to stop," David said.

The Gainesville banker

The first time Denise and David saw delicate icy flakes falling from the sky was on a Sunday. Because of the excitement at their first snowfall, they sang at the top of their lungs that afternoon as they worked on a rooftop. One swept away the snow and the other nailed the shingles.

When the nice car came down the old logging road, then up the hill and stopped, they were amazed.

"We never saw people. We didn't know how he got his car up that muddy hill," Denise recalled, laughing.

A man got out of the car, leaving a woman inside and said, "What are ya'll doing?"

The Kraft youths got down off the roof and for two hours told the man and his wife how they were building a resort. Finally the man said, "Well, good luck. It was nice meetin' y'all," and left.

By this time they had a phone, and that evening their father called from Florida.

"Did a man come by to see you today?" he asked. He said the man had called him in Florida, said, "There's no way that your mountain resort is not gonna work," then told him to consider his loan application approved.

"And all this bank business happened on a Sunday," Denise said, the wonder still in her voice despite the years since it happened.

The man was James Mathis Sr., president of Home Federal Savings & Loan in Gainesville, which later was purchased by SunTrust.

The property still had no significant power line, and that winter the weather was below freezing for several weeks. The last time Denise and David bathed in their creek pond, it had ice in it. Each night, an icy pocket formed where David was breathing into his sleeping bag.

One morning, Denise cooked an over-easy egg on the Coleman stove, put it in her plate and went to prepare something else. When she came back, the egg had frozen solid. She did not undress even once during the winter weather and even slept in her shoes.

Miraculously, neither David nor Denise was injured or caught pneumonia. Finally six cabins were finished, complete with handmade furniture.

At about this time, their father went to a futuristic home show and discovered hot tubs. He told his children that the cabins must have them, so two new cabins were built with these contraptions.

They had cabins to rent but were getting very few takers. A brochure they made, black printed words with stick-figure art on yellow paper, said, "If you need some service we haven't thought of yet, suggest it to us. If it isn't illegal, immoral or excessively fattening, we can probably arrange it. We'll certainly try."

Denise moved into one of the cabins; Michele came to join her, finished her high school in Lumpkin County and later demonstrated a natural artistic and marketing talent.

They were lucky if they got one telephone call a week, and whoever answered the phone asked for no name, no deposit and no arrival time. They simply gave directions and then waited to see who might show up.

Guests in those days had to bring their own foods and linens, but they were so impressed that they usually wanted to help build the resort. One guest returned home, made beautiful handmade wooden signs for them and mailed them back. The signs still can be seen on the original cabins.

Five years passed. It was 1982; guests still were few and they were talking about bankruptcy.

At this time, a writer named Betty Holt with the Atlanta Journal Constitution's magazine called "Atlanta Weekly" came to talk to them, saying she was including Forrest Hills in an article about four different Georgia mountain resorts. David and Denise sat together in the hot tub for a picture to go with the article.

The AJC magazine came out on a Sunday in December. That Saturday night after the first papers hit the street, the phone started ringing, and it rang all night. The trio divided the phone-answering into two-hour shifts, not hanging it up but just pushing the receiver button to take the next caller.

Business had finally begun, but there was one big problem. Every caller wanted one of the two cabins with a hot tub.

The hot-tub fiasco

Without hesitation, the Kraft resort-builders said "yes" and planned to quickly build more hot-tub cabins. One bedroom in the two-bedroom cabins was replaced with a hot tub, and they began building more cabins as fast as they could. Sometimes they were going out the back door with their tools while the guests were coming in the front door.

Once, two guests arrived at noon for the only cabin available; the plumbing wasn't finished and it was full of boxes. The guests were told that the regular check-in time had been changed to 3 p.m. At 3 p.m. they came back and were ushered into a spotless new cabin.

Another time, guests who had come three days earlier said they were no longer amused at the bathroom problem. The commode was filling up with hot water at each flush because David had accidentally hooked it to the water heater.

Guests made suggestions about what they would like to experience at a mountain resort, and the Krafts always listened. If three guests suggested the same thing, the item or experience was added to the Forrest Hills ambiance.

Later, when Denise was in Switzerland getting a master's degree in hotel management, she was amazed at what they had done. She saw a time graph showing years of changes in the hotel industry and learned that Forrest Hills was always a half step ahead.

"It's because we always listened to our guests," she said.

Today, Forrest Hills has 96 rooms, 228 beds and about 40 employees. The cabins vary from the most simple with linoleum floors to elegant finery with hardwood floors, carpets and fine antique furniture. Roads and walkways vary from blacktop to inlaid bricks.

Groups have included Coca Cola executives, church members, school students and the Roosevelt Warm Springs staff. At weddings, all the guests can be housed, and brides always arrive at the ceremony in a white horse-drawn carriage.

Guests get to know each other at wine-tasting evenings. Covered wagons sometimes take guests to a 1800s style building called the River House, which is lighted inside with candles and lanterns. There, a campfire is built near the footbridge, musicians play string instruments for singing, and David cooks steaks.

Guests almost always return. At least one who was charmed by Forrest Hills when she about 6 or 7 already has found her way back for her wedding, then again to bring her own children.

The three Kraft children have married, and Michele and David each have two children of their own. They all live at Forrest Hills as do their mother and father. Stephen, the oldest son, who helped the first months of the adventure, now lives in Washington State.

The three Kraft offspring now own the resort after buying out their father's interest. They still are exploring the woods, and after finding new evidence of ancient mountain homesteads, they want to restore some old rock walls.

Originally published Sunday, March 19, 2006