Eagles and Shoal Creek
What’s the fascination with eagles of Shoal Creek?“Well, it’s our nation’s bird,” Hall Thompson explained. “It appears on our currency…on the seal of the country. I can’t say I’ve ever seen one fly over the Shoal Creek property, though, I decided to use the eagle statues just because of my love of the bird.”
Thompson told the tale of the eagle weather vane that sits atop the cupola on the top of the clubhouse.
“My daughter, Judy was at an art show in Atlanta and saw this eagle made of copper. She liked it and thought I would too. She let me know that she’d found this weather vane that might work.
“I told her to contact the lady who was selling it at the show, and to get her to send me a picture of it. This she did and subsequently some Polaroids, together with a note on its price, arrived. I was busy with the course and clubhouse construction at the time, so I threw it in my desk and forgot about it.
“Some months later, Lucy was at Eastwood Mall and saw a weather vane exactly like the one Judy had described. She related this story to the seller, who said that it was not just like it, but that it was the very same weather vane.
“Lucy liked the weather vane as much as Judy had, and asked the lady to hold it until I could make up my mind. But the store owner said she’d never heard from me, so she had no reason to think things would be any different this time around.
“Lucy told me that I had to take a look at it. First I called Ed Bailey, the clubhouse architect and our close friend, and asked him to measure it for scale as it would relate to the rest of the building. This he did and reported to me that it was perfect. So we were sold. It turns out that the weather vane came with some history attached. It had sat atop an old federal courthouse in North Carolina for many, many years and was rescued when the courthouse was torn down.
It had been shot more than once, as you could hear the shotgun pellets rattling around inside it.
“So now the eagle’s home is flying majestically from the cupola.”