To
appreciate the life of Georgina Yeatman it is helpful to keep in mind the life
and times of the better-known Carteret County resident Alice Green Hoffman, whose
life and exploits are covered in detail in other locations on this site.
Carteret
County in 1940 had a population of barely 18,200 and fewer than 17,000 in 1930.
The
male-dominated culture of the times characterized women as mothers at home
taking care of the babies, tending to the cooking and cleaning. Few women
were involved in professions other than teaching even though the 19th Amendment
to the United States Constitution, giving women the right to vote, was passed
in 1920.
Given
that environment it is extraordinary that Alice Green Hoffman was able to live and
prosper as an independent, non-conformist, free-spirited individual. Perhaps even more extraordinary is that
during the same timeframe, Carteret County had a second strong,
socially prominent and widely traveled woman,
socially prominent and widely traveled woman,
 |
| Miss Yeatman |
who
was born to a well-to-do Northeast family and educated in the best schools.
Like Alice, Georgina came to Carteret County later in life, acquired large land
holdings, and lived in a remote part of the county with a female business
partner. Both also tried farming, raising cattle, harvesting timber, and
the dairy business.[i]
In addition, Miss Yeatman owned and flew her own planes and was an accredited architect.
 |
| Waco Biplane, F-2, 1931 |
Georgina’s
earliest exposure to North Carolina was mentioned in the society page of the New York Times, Dec 19 1921, in news
from the Pinehurst Country Club, NC: "A good size riding party which
covered a wide circuit yesterday morning, included . . . Miss Georgina Pope
Yeatman of Philadelphia . . ."
She
became interested in Carteret County in the early 1930s when flying over the
large expanse of cultivated fields in an area northeast of Beaufort.
Georgina Pope Yeatman purchased a parcel she called the Open Grounds
from the University of Chicago in 1936, [ii] and acquired other adjacent properties, bring her
total Open Grounds holdings by the late1940s to over 43,000 acres.[iii] – a spread
significantly larger than the Alice Hoffman estate, but it lacked an Ocean
view.
 |
| Open Grounds is the checker board, one mile squares |
To
escape the intense heat in eastern Carolina, Yeatman also owned a home in
Asheville, NC, at 353 Midland Drive. She owned a house in Beaufort’s
Hancock Park on Live Oak St. as well. Here, she had a telephone. Her Open
Grounds property had its own water and electricity but no phone or permanent
utilities until the mid-1950s.[iv]
When
Miss Yeatman died in 1980, she still lived on her homestead off Yeatman Ln.
 |
| The road to her homestead |
She had sold her farming operation to the Ferruzzi Group, an Italian agricultural corporation, in 1974. The
Open Grounds Farm is still in operation today, being one of the largest farms
in North Carolina and a major source of tax revenue in Carteret County. Like Mrs. Hoffman, Georgina left her
mark.
Her
philanthropic interests included a number of local churches attended by her
employees as well as St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Beaufort Historical
Association, and state universities at Greenville and Chapel Hill. She also gave a
quarter-million dollar gift to the North Carolina State University Foundation.
There
is no record that Alice and Georgina knew each other, but given the times,
their backgrounds and the uniqueness of their endeavors, it is hard to believe
that they did not.
To contact the author or the History Committee
____________________
For further reading see:
[i]
http://readinform.com/tag/georgina-pope-yeatman
[ii]
http://www.trianglemodernisthouses.com/ncwomen.htm
[iii]
Open Grounds, The State, 1 January 1967, p 66
[iv] Open Grounds, Then and Now,
Ruth P Barbour