According to the 150th Anniversary Bulletin of Ebenezer United Methodist Church, compiled by Lenora Ginn in 1990, it is thought that the church building dates to 1840, but the congregation was organized many years earlier. Further research is needed to confirm this date. The community was then known as Stewartsville, but has long disappeared from maps.
This is among the most important surviving early Plantation Plain houses in Georgia. For many years it was suggested that LaFayette visited the house in 1825, an anecdote perpetuated by the D.A.R. and Georgia Historical markers but now proven to be apocryphal. The myth was so revered that the local D. A. R. chapter even named themselves the Lamar-Lafayette Chapter. The area, still located in Pike County at the time, had only recently been opened by land lotteries. Benjamin Gachet (born in 1790, in France), bought property in this area in 1825 and subsequently acquired adjoining lots and built this house sometime in 1828. A small number of enslaved people were integral to this endeavor. Benjamin died in 1829 and his widow, Caroline Matilda Stubbs Gachet, lived in this house for another 20 years. She began selling off the land to her son-in-law, Benjamin M. Milner. Benjamin and Margaret Gachet Milner’s youngest son, J. S. Milner, lived in the house as late as the 1930s. In 1954 Dudley Cannafax, whose sister had married a Milner, purchased the house. Cannafax enlisted Atlanta architect (also Cannafax’s son-in-law) to restore the house. They rebuilt the detached kitchen, which had been lost since 1938. Upon the death of Mrs. Dudley Cannafax, the estate offered the house to the local D.A.R. Chapter, but they were unable to afford its upkeep and it was subsequently rented for many years. In 1987, it was purchased by the Geiger family, owners of the Barnesville Herald-Gazette. They have further restored the house under the direction of Atlanta architect W. Lane Greene.
National Register of Historic Places