Tag Archives: Civil War in Georgia

Orna Villa, Circa 1820, Oxford

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Christened “Orna Villa” in 1820 by Dr. Alexander Means, Jr. (1801-1883), this is the oldest house in Oxford, and if the log house from which it was expanded is considered, likely has origins in the 1790s.

In her highly-readable history of the house, current owner Lisa Dorward has done more research than anyone else, it seems. She writes: A Virginian by the name of Richard Keenon Dearing had come to Georgia in 1793 and purchased 2,000 acres of land on which he built a four-room plantation house of hand-hewn logs.  Dr. Means bought the house from Dearing around 1820 and set about expanding and remodeling it into the grand Greek Revival house it is today.  Among Dr. Means’s many interests was ornithology, so he named his home that stood among the trees, Orna Villa, meaning “Bird House.”

Alexander Means, Jr., was a renaissance man who, as the Oxford Historical Society notes, served as a physician, school teacher, scientist, college professor, poet, college president, statesman, and as the first state chemist in the United States. Born to an Irish immigrant father and Scots-Irish mother in Statesville, North Carolina, Means settled circa 1820 in what would eventually become the town of Oxford. He married Sarah A. E. Winston in 1827 and they had 11 children. He helped establish the Newton County Female Seminary, served as president of the Georgia Conference Manual Labor School, and taught natural sciences at the newly established Emory College, among other academic endeavors. He entertained President Millard Fillmore at Orna Villa, and delivered the funeral oration for President Zachary Taylor. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Medicine degree from the Medical College of Georgia, where he taught during winter sessions. He retired from Emory in 1855, after briefly serving as president. Though he traveled and lectured in many locations, he remained at Orna Villa throughout his life.

As accomplished as he was and as varied his interests, Means, was also man of his time Research by Dr. Gary Hauk and Dr. Sally Wolff King suggests that between 20-28 men, women, and children were enslaved at Orna Villa. Ironically perhaps, Dr. Means was initially opposed to secession, but soon became a vocal supporter of the Confederacy.

Orna Villa stands today as one of the most tangible symbols of Oxford and Newton County’s early history. There are quite a few “ghost stories” related to the house, as well, especially those concerning Toby Means, but you’ll have to read Lisa Doward’s articles to learn more about them.


National Register of Historic Places

Harris-Turner House, Circa 1836 + 1903, Covington

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From inspiring Margaret Mitchell’s Hollywood vision of Ashley Wilkes’s home, Twelve Oaks, in Gone With the Wind, to appearances in In the Heat of the Night, The Vampire Diaries, Vacation, Life of the Party, The Family That Preys, and other movies and television shows, this magnificent home has perhaps come to symbolize Covington more than any other.

The home was built as a Greek Revival townhouse for Judge John Harris (1803-1878) circa 1836, on a smaller scale. After his country plantation, east of Covington, was occupied by Union troops in 1864, Harris sold his townhouse to William J. Metcalf. Circa 1881, it was sold to Robert Franklin Wright, Sr. (1821-1919). Wright and his wife, Salina Frances Robinson Wright (1831-1905), named it “The Cedars”. Major changes were made to the house after its purchase, in 1903, by Covington Mills owner Nathaniel Snead Turner (1863-1931). Turner later renamed it Whitehall, after adding the colonnade, second floor porch, and a third floor with dormers.

The Harris-Turner House, as it’s also known, is now known as The Twelve Oaks and serves as a popular bed and breakfast inn. It’s a wonder not to be missed when in Covington.

Covington Historic District, National Register of Historic Places

Candler Oak, Savannah

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Savannah may be as well known for its moss-draped ancient oaks as for its superb architecture, and the Candler Oak may just be the biggest and oldest of them all. Located about midway on the Drayton Street side of Forsyth Park, this regal oak is 54-feet tall, boasts a circumference of 17-feet, and has a crown spread of over 110-feet.

It’s older than Georgia itself, and at approximately 300 years old, is believed to have been a sapling in the early 1700s. By the time its branches shaded Union prisoners held in stockade here during the Civil War, it was already a substantial tree. From 1819 until 1980, the tree was a well-known landmark on the grounds of the Savannah Poor House & Hospital and Candler Hospital [the tree’s namesake]. It’s now adjacent to SCAD’s Deloitte Foundry.

It was nearly lost to progress and development, but was saved by the Savannah Tree Foundation in 1982, when that group obtained a conservation easement of 6,804 feet that insured its protection well into the future. This is the first known easement for a single tree. It’s now held together by screws and cables, surrounded by a formidable fence, and monitored by 24-hour video surveillance. Hopefully, all these protections will allow it to live long into the future.


Savannah Historic District, National Historic Landmark

Bellevue, 1855, LaGrange

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Benjamin Harvey Hill (detail), circa 1870-1880. Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Bellevue is a grand Greek Revival mansion, originally the center of a 1200-acre plantation property, built by Benjamin Harvey Hill (1823-1882) for his wife Caroline Holt Hill (1825-1904). It’s surrounded today by one of LaGrange’s premier historic residential districts. It was donated to the LaGrange Woman’s Club by the Fuller E. Callaway Foundation in 1942 and they have been its guardians ever since.

Benjamin Hill, who was born at Hillsboro in Jasper County, has been called a political chameleon for his wavering views and various party alliances. He started his career as a Whig and then became a strong Fillmore-supporting Unionist. Ultimately, he was Southern partisan who voted in favor of secession and quickly voiced public support for Confederate President Jefferson Davis while serving in the Confederate senate. Davis was even a visitor to Bellevue. In response to Reconstruction and the governorship of Republican Rufus Bullock, Hill helped inaugurate the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia during a speech made on 23 July 1868 that supported violence against the governor and others in favor of the Reconstruction government. He was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives and to the U. S. Senate in 1877. He died in office in 1882. Ben Hill County is named for him.

National Register of Historic Places + National Historic Landmark

Dr. J. T. Reese House, Circa 1856, Newnan

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This fine Greek Revival townhouse is one of the architectural highlights of Greenville Street, in one of the oldest residential historic districts in Newnan. It was built by Dr. J. T. Reese, an early druggist in the community. Newnan was known as a hospital town during the Civil War, and this was one of the houses where injured soldiers were taken for care.

The house is also associated with the Umberger family and known as the Reese-Umberger House. The colonnade was likely added in the early 1900s when the Neoclassical movement was in full swing.

Greenville Street-LaGrange Street Historic District, National Register of Historic Places

Red Hill Christian Church Rises From the Ashes of June Fire

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A lightning strike took out the historic Red Hill Christian Church near Richland on 21 June 2023. By early December, the congregation had already rebuilt it in the same manner as the original, and it looks like they’re nearly ready to move back in and begin holding services.

The first Christian Church [Disciples of Christ] in Georgia was constituted at this site in 1837. Services were held early in the 1830’s by Rev. George Lynch Smith, first in a brush arbor and later in a log schoolhouse. It was first known as Providence Chapel. The structure lost in June was built in 1857 during the pastorate of Rev. Smith’s son, Dr. Jubilee Smith, who served the congregation until 1895. It was originally a two-story building, with the second floor serving as home to Smith Lodge No. 233, F. &. A. M. Dr. Smith organized Co. I, 17th Georgia Infantry here in August 1861. The second floor was removed much later; I’m not sure when the name was changed to Red Hill.

Forsyth City Cemetery, Circa 1823

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Victorian obelisks at sunrise

The Forsyth City Cemetery, also known as Oakland, is thought to have been first associated with the Forsyth Methodist Church, who built a church and adjacent burying ground in 1828. The church is long gone but the cemetery has expanded greatly. It’s a bit curious, though, that the earliest known burial dates to 1827. All that is known of the decedent, Elizabeth Griffin Beal, (1808-1827), is that she was the wife of Robert Beal and daughter of William and Rachel Griffin. A typical young wife and sadly, a typical early death. Nothing extraordinary in those facts. But the fact that her memorial predates the church cemetery suggests that the property may have been used as early as the founding of Forsyth in 1823.

This burial ground is one of those great repositories of local history, with a wide range of funerary memorials and markings and, when compared to some of our other cemeteries, is quite easy to navigate, by car and by foot. It has a Confederate section and and African-American section. I only photographed a few memorials and markers and they’re presented here in no particular order.

The mausoleum of the family of Isaac Whiting Ensign (1820-1907) is one of the architectural highlights of the cemetery. Ensign was a native of Connecticut.

This is a small portion of the Confederate section. The nearby Methodist church served as a hospital during the Civil War and many casualties of the Atlanta Campaign were brought here for care and/or burial. Of the nearly 300 burials in this section, a large number are unknown.

Many of the unknown Confederate markers were honored with American flags, which is wrong on many levels, not the least of which being that when they died they were not Americans. I presume it was done purposefully since there are many but I don’t understand the reasoning. I’m sure someone will attempt to explain at some point. The Confederate flag may not belong in many places, but on the grave of an unknown Confederate soldier is certainly one of the places it would be expected to be found.

The modern memorial for Only Patience Outlaw Anderson (1777-1864) was placed by Anderson descendants in 2017, and made by the Barnesville Marble Company. Her name got my attention first. Only Patience Outlaw. But I learned that she was a refugee in Civil War-era Forsyth who died while here. The marker notes that she was the matriarch of early East Tennessee family, Daughter of Col. Alexander Outlaw & Penelope Smith Outlaw. Widow of Hon Joseph Inslee Anderson, Bvt. Major Revolutionary War, U. S. Territorial Judge, U. S. Senator Tennessee, 1st Comptroller U. S. Treasury. He was the namesake of Andersonville and Anderson County, Tennessee.

This is the Oliver Morse (1802-1868) family enclosure, at least he was the oldest decedent I found. Low fences made of local stone are found mostly in cemeteries north of the Fall Line, though many have collapsed and intact examples are increasingly uncommon. They are usually associated with locally prominent families.

The Pye family enclosure may be my favorite in the Forsyth City Cemetery, for its presence of these old brick crypts, some of which are in very poor condition. The earliest readable memorial here dates to 1852, and I’m sure these brick crypts are much older.

Saving the Adam Strain Building

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When I heard in 2018 that the Adam Strain Building was slated for likely demolition, I felt anger, impending loss, and a sense of betrayal that a building with so many historical connections dating back at least 200 years could simply be allowed to go out like that. Despite being burned during the Civil War, it survived to become an unofficial symbol of Darien.

I was very aware of its endangered state, from photographs I made as early as 2009, a year after the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation brought attention to it by naming it a Place in Peril. And Darien friends who reached out over the years were cautiously optimistic, but mostly fearful, for what its future held.

I got an exciting message from one of those friends, Kit Stebbins Sutherland, in 2020. She was still cautiously optimistic, but said that the impossible had happened and the Adam Strain Building was going to be saved. Kit grew up in Darien with a mother who spent years creating an amazing photographic archive of its historic buildings and coastal landmarks, so her interest in her hometown is palpable. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Fast forward to the present and the restoration is in full swing. Milan and Marion Savic of Marietta are the new owners of the Adam Strain Building and the circa 1898 Bank of Darien [pink building to immediate left of Strain Building] and are doing everything right. They’ve emphasized the benefits of keeping everything as original as possible, especially protecting the tabby siding which is one of the distinct aspects of the Strain’s construction. It’s in the good hands of Ethos Preservation, Landmark Preservation, and Lominack Coleman Smith Architects. They’re doing the serious work of putting everything back into place and insuring the building is around for another 200 years. I hope to get more detailed photos in the near future, and will share them here.

West Darien Historic District, National Register of Historic Places

Holly Court, Circa 1825 & 1840s, Washington

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Also known as the Ficklen-Lyndon-Johnson House, Holly Court is somewhat typical of the grander townhouses of 19th century Georgia, in that a “marriage” of structures led to its present appearance. The lot on which it’s located was owned from 1817-1830 by Bill Hoxey [born circa 1789], a free man of color from the Savannah area who was an accomplished carpenter. He was also a deacon of the Washington Baptist church, serving the Black members. It is believed that part of the original structure built on the lot by Hoxey circa 1825 has been incorporated into the house. Mr. Hoxey sold the property to William L. Harris in 1830. Laws of the day apparently prohibited even free Blacks from selling property so that was handled by Hoxey’s trustee, Lewis Brown.

Harris spent only three years at the property, selling it to Lock Weems in 1833. Improvements to the house were made by Weems before he sold it to his mother-in-law, Mary Shepherd, in 1836. Dr. Fielding Ficklen, Jr., (1801-1869) purchased it in 1837 and made further improvements. He enlarged it by moving and attaching another structure, which is now the front elevation, from his farmland about seven miles outside town. [Mrs. Jefferson Davis and her children stayed in the home in 1865, awaiting the arrival of her husband after the fall of Richmond]. Upon his father’s death in 1869, Dr. Joseph Burwell Ficklen (1830-1886) occupied the house. It is believed that his wife, Julia Weems Ficklen (1843-1925), was responsible for the fine landscaping that became a defining feature of the property.

In 1890, George Edward Lyndon (1845-1927), who later served as Washington mayor, bought the property from the Ficklen heirs. After Lyndon’s death in 1927, the house was owned by a relative, Andrew Lyndon. It sat empty for quite some time but served as the location for a mattress production project of the Works Progress Administration [W.P.A.] during the 1930s. Rochford Johnson (1897-1960) bought the house in 1939 and his wife, Elizabeth Barksdale Johnson (1897-1985) gave it the name Holly Court.

National Register of Historic Places


Bacon-Fraser House, 1839, Hinesville

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Hinesville was established in 1837 to replace Riceboro as the seat of Liberty County. Just two years later, on what was then a 23-acre tract, this Federally-influenced Plantation Plain townhouse was built by Mary Jane Hazzard Bacon, the widow of Major John Bacon of Riceboro.

The property was occupied by Union troops under the command of General William T. Sherman in 1864 and several outbuildings were burned. The house was saved by Mrs. Bacon, who displayed her husband’s Masonic apron for protection. Many more generations of the family owned the home until 2017, when it became the headquarters of the Liberty County Chamber of Commerce and the Liberty County Convention and Visitors Bureau.

The beautifully landscaped yard is dominated by historic Live Oaks, some of the largest to be found in inland Liberty County.

National Register of Historic Places