William H. Mell is believed to be the first owner of this home, more commonly known today as the Capers Dickson House, for the next owner, William Glen Capers “Judge” Dickson (1845-1914). Dickson was a private in Company 1, Cobb’s Legion, Infantry Batallion. Dickson served as a city judge in the courts of Newton County and was a law professor at Emory College.
The facade of the house is very reminiscent of the Milledgeville Federal style, though the overall floor plan is L-shaped.
Oxford Historic District, National Register of Historic Places
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.
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
With the recent loss of the old Liberty Methodist Church, this early I-House [Plantation Plain] is the last significant landmark that I know of in the long lost settlement of Calvin, in Jasper County. The two-over-two central hallway dwelling also features shed rooms across the rear and, barely visible on the left side of this image, a formerly detached kitchen which was later attached by a breezeway.
Wiley Phillips (1791 or 1792-4 August 1875) is believed to have been the first owner of the house but Sarah Yarborough from Warren County was the first owner of the property and the house may have been built around the time of her marriage to Jesse Tollerson [also recorded as Tollison] in 1813. Wiley Phillips’s nephew, Calvin Fish, is considered the first white child born in Jasper County and was the namesake of the Calvin community. Thomas Smith purchased it in 1833 but sold it to Richard Turner in 1835. Turner never actually lived in the house, though he, and later his estate, owned it until 1863, at which time his son-in-law, Benjamin B. Freeman, sold it to Shelly P. Downs. Downs was a physician and served as surgeon with the 38th Regiment of the Georgia Militia during the Civil War. It was next owned by Seaborn C. Kelly (1836-1872) sometime between 1866 and 1872. Kelly sold the house to James Benton on 15 January 1872. Scarcely three weeks after Kelly sold the house, on 7 February 1872, he and his brother John C. Kelly were murdered in Monticello by Clinton Digby, a cousin of Seaborn Kelly’s wife, in a disputer over a Black laborer. James Benton sold the house to Seaborn Kelly’s son, Burton Clark Kelly, in 1885 and it remained in the family until 1997, though it was unoccupied from circa 1958 until being sold to Philip A. Jones in 1998. Mr. Jones’s extensive research is the source of most of the ownership history.
This Greek Revival cottage was built circa 1840 for Henry Dudley Taylor, one of the first trustees of Andrew College. It was purchased by Marcellus Douglass (1820-1862) in 1860. According to the History of Butts County, Georgia, 1825-1976, Douglass, a native of Butts County, was an honor graduate and trustee of the University of Georgia who moved to Cuthbert to practice law. He also ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Whig. Douglass never spent much time in the home, however, as he died while serving as colonel in temporary command of Lawton’s Brigade at the Battle of Antietam at the age of 31. The family of Nelson Coffin (1901-1970), a mayor of Cuthbert in the 1950s, have owned it for many years.
Cuthbert Historic District, National Register of Historic Places
George Washington Jackson came with his family to Dougherty County from Wilkinson County as a young boy. At the age of ten he moved with his widowed mother and brother and sister to the Mount Enon community, several miles from Baconton. He served as a lieutenant in the Confederate army and later as a county commissioner. He had farming operations all over what is today northern Mitchell County; he built this home in 1898 to replace a log farmhouse at this location. He and his wife, Eulelia Peacock Jackson, had nine children. Numerous other families lived here throughout the 20th century.
The city of Baconton saved this important historic home and transformed it into their city hall. It’s a great example of thinking outside the box. Perhaps it will serve as inspiration for other communities to pursue non-traditional avenues of preservation.
Local lumber baron John Ernest Donalson (1846-1920), for whom nearby Donalsonville, Georgia, was named, built this house in 1898. In addition to his vast holdings with the Donalson Lumber Company, he was a Confederate veteran, well-known Georgia entrepreneur, lawyer, and judge. Bainbridge was the center of his business operations.
The Queen Anne home, possibly a George Barber design, originally featured Tiffany stained-glass windows, but they were removed by a later owner and sold. The house is also said to have been the first in Bainbridge to feature wire window screens, quite an innovation at the time.
Bainbridge Residential Historic District, National Register of Historic Places
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.
This house was built on the eve of the Civil War for Bolling Anthony Stovall (19 August 1827-24 August 1887), a prominent Piedmont merchant and engineer born in Hancock County to a well-to-do family who had come to Georgia from Virginia. Upon moving to Augusta, he began work as a cotton factor while attending Richmond Academy before entering Franklin College (University of Georgia). He studied civil engineering and worked in Alabama and Mississippi for a few years before returning to Georgia. He was also a surveyor for improvements to the Georgia State Road and worked with Major John G. Greene in the survey of the Atlanta & West Point Railroad. Because employment in engineering was sporadic at the time, he joined his father in his wholesale grocery business at Stovall & McLaughlin in Augusta. At the outset of the war, he entered the Confederate service as a sergeant with Company A, Richmond Hussars, Cobb’s Legion. He was transferred to the engineering corps as a lieutenant under General John Bankhead Magruder during the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, before finishing out the war as a captain in the subsistence department under the command of fellow Augustan General Isaac Munroe St. John. He married Mattie Wilson after the war and worked for many years as a traveling agent with the Georgia Chemical Works of Augusta.
Stovall’s son, Pleasant Alexander Stovall (7 July 1857-14 May 1935), lived in the house until his parents left Augusta for Athens, in 1873. He became a prominent journalist and eventual owner of a Savannah newspaper. His childhood friend, President Woodrow Wilson, appointed him Ambassador to Switzerland in 1913, where he served until 1919.
Congressman George T. Barnes purchased the home in 1873 and in the 20th century it was used as a residential hotel/boarding house.
Greene Street Historic District, National Register of Historic Places
This is one of the most outstanding Greek Revival houses in Georgia and is well-maintained. I believe it was built by Thomas T. Napier, whose Virginia-born father, Thomas Napier, owned over 6000 acres in Bibb and surrounding counties at the time of his death in 1838. Thomas T. Napier also built a home in Ringgold in 1836. I will do my best to clarify this history when I can better discern the genealogy.
Vanishing Georgia: Photographs by Brian Brown 