Never Grow Up

Art Millican believes in fairies. He makes a living building houses for them. Large, small, hidden, flamboyant, wacky, practical, he builds them all in his workshop in Blairsville, Georgia.

Tucked into the North Georgia hillside are dozens of fairy houses, sized for the smallest, daintiest fairies to the tallest, proudest dwarves.

Dubbed Whimsical Fairy Gardens, the spellbinding estates live up to the name. From the entrance to the workshop and through the open garden itself, reality blurs with the fantastical. Large, bright houses tug on the eyes, but more houses appear upon second, third and fourth inspection.

Meticulously detailed doors the size of baseballs are set into the hillside, nailed into the bases of trees and pressed against moss-covered boulders. 

The garden is open to all ages, as long as no one forgets the golden rule.

“Don’t grow up,” Millican says. “That’s the one rule about being here.”

The location seems odd at first: nearly hidden in remote northern Georgia, an hour’s drive from the nearest big city. Millican has a connection with Blairsville, Georgia, though. Growing up, his parents owned a cabin there, and in a past life Millican was a rafting guide on the nearby Ocoee River. 

Finding a place in Blairsville for the fairy gardens was not a difficult task. The land spoke to him.

“When I first found this place and I came up here, it was late at night, the whole place was just filled with fireflies. So it was magical,” Millican says.

Because as everyone knows, fireflies are just little fairies. 

Staying young forever is the name of the game, and Millican is rewarded for his work every day.

“When the kids come here and we tell them to go out and look for fairies and stuff like that, it’s amazing to see how excited they get. They all think they’re going to find Tinkerbelle,” he says. “Why destroy that imagination?”

Millican sees no reason to dismiss the ideas of children. When people confront him about the naivety of believing in fairies, he responds resolutely.

“Who’s to say that they don’t exist?” he says.

Millican is preserving a culture he gained from working at Disney, where he was a senior artist for the Imagineers. At Disney, Imagineers are responsible for designing and building theme parks, resorts, cruise ships, and other entertainment venues.

Brought up by an artist mother and a florist father certainly impacted the way Millican saw the world. He went directly from high school in Florida to try and find a job at Disney World, but they would not hire him. He wound up selling popcorn by day and nagging the Disney artists by night.  

“I would go and find where all the artists lived and worked and I’d just hang around with them and bug them to death until they finally just said, ‘Give him something to do to get rid of him!’” Millican says.

Disney started him off in the model shop, teaching him to take vague drawings and produce specific results.

“They would just give you a drawing and say ‘Build this.’ There were no blueprints or anything, they just said ‘I want it about this size,’” Millican says.

Along with the other Disney artists, Millican was instructed to turn ideas into tangible models with few to no materials.

“We learned from old-world craftsmen. They would come over from Germany and England and teach us how to make things out of nothing. We’d start taking apart the building to get materials,” Millican says.

“We were old school,” he adds with pride.

At 62, retired from Disney, Millican has been building various fairy houses in Blairsville to sell for the last 14 years. He constructs a range of houses from one foot all the way up to four feet tall. Smaller houses begin at $49, while the larger, walk-through houses start at $1,200. He builds by demand and also for his gardens. 

The houses help keep Millican young. He fondly remembers his childhood, with very little technology and certainly no cell phones.

“You used your imagination to play,” he says.

Millican holds weeklong classes during the summer at his workshop. He teaches kids how to sculpt and do basic things like making wooden mechanical toys. These classes are another way Millican is preserving youthful culture.

“The whole idea of this place was to teach kids to use their imaginations,” he says.

Creative thinking changes your perspective on the world.

“You see a bottle cap and now that’s either an umbrella for a fairy or a special kind of window,” Millican says.

Millican challenges the kids in his classes to craft genuine houses. He encourages them to make sturdy homes that would withstand a wolf’s huff and puff.

“If you were a fairy and you were going to build your house, what would you build it out of?” says Millican.

The classes are beginner level and focus on developing functional skills in children. These are important to Millican because he feels these skills are disappearing from schools.

“When I go and speak at schools and hold up a hammer, half of them don’t even know what the heck it is,” Millican says.

Every day Millican fights against the onrush of the digital world. He defends the old school theology by continuing to build in this way as well as passing down the knowledge in workshops.

Millican fights this eternally uphill battle with passion because he knows something most people never discover. He knows the secret to staying young at heart: “Never growing up. Don’t put childish things away. Never stop believing.”