The antebellum Greek Revival plantation home of John Woolfolk (1781-1861) in Wynnton is one of the most significant surviving houses of early Columbus. Woolfolk and William L. Wynn were the first settlers of the Wynnton area. Woolfolk, a native of Virginia, first came to Augusta before he began acquiring land in Muscogee County in the 1820s. He owned large acreage on the north side of Wynnton Road and purchased the land on which he built this house in 1832, the same year he was elected to the Georgia legislature. The house is important in terms of architectural history, but also African-American history, as it is estimated that approximately 180 enslaved people were held here before Emancipation, according to historian Calvin Schermerhorn’s The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism 1815-1860. With his nephew, Austin Woolfolk he was a slave trader, who enslaved nearly 700 people in total. This gave rise to an urban legend suggesting the one of Woolfolk’s sons hunted down and killed slaves and buried them on the grounds or in the walls of the house, known in the legend as the House of a Thousand Cadavers. Of course, considering the value of the enslaved as property, this is highly unlikely. Perhaps the Woolfolk son was just particularly cruel.
Woolfolk’s daughters inherited his estate, which was already being subdivided to accommodate the growth of Wynnton, when he died in 1861. The property later passed to Judge William A. Little and was for a time known as the Little Place. In 1925, it was owned by Minnie J. Flournoy, who transformed it into the Colonial Apartments. She removed the original side porticoes, which have since been replaced, and added one-story wings to the house. This configuration (above) was documented in Howard Major’s seminal work Domestic Architecture of the Early American Republic: The Greek Revival (Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott, 1926).
National Register of Historic Places
