This Greek Revival landmark was originally the home of General Elias H. Beall (c.1783-1866), who helped established a trading post that became the city of Columbus for Governor John Forsyth. Beall, a native of Guilford County, North Carolina, migrated to Georgia with his parents in the 1790s. He and his first wife, Mary “Polly” Beall, moved to Oglethorpe County in 1808 and by 1824 were residing in Monroe County, where Beall was a Presidential Elector. In the 1830s, they were living in Macon. At some point Beall moved to present-day Hamilton, Georgia, where he built this house circa 1847. He moved to Texas within just a few years of building this house.
After the Civil War, the house was purchased by James Monroe Mobley. It is also known as the Beall-Mobley-Williams House.
Curiously, a portion of the house is used today as a Subway restaurant. An architect was used to do the modification and I presume he was sensitive to preserving the historical importance of the house.
This marvelous structure originated as a Federal I-House and was likely begun much earlier than the given date of circa 1830. Some have suggested that it was the second house ever built in Hamilton, but that needs further substantiation. Its earliest known owner was Williamson Switzer, Judge of the Inferior Court of Harris County from 1833-37. Switzer was among the most prominent citizens of Harris County in his day and was instrumental in the establishment of the poor asylum in the county in 1835. Later owners were Porter Ingram and William Irby Hudson, a Georgia state legislator and senator.
According to the 1973 nomination form which added this property to the National Register of Historic Places: Construction of the housebegan in 1828. It is an amalgamation of two two-story…houses to which was added a mid-19th century portico and several 20th century rooms…[the house] is an example of what happened to vernacular architecture in Georgia as a family and its needs and stylistic wants grew and changed…
George Washington Bonaparte Towns (1801-1854) was born in Wilkes County, though his family soon moved to Greene County, and then on to Morgan County. He moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1821, and operated a pub while studying law. He was admitted to the bar in 1824. He also briefly owned a newspaper, the Alabama Journal. His first marriage, to Margaret Jane Campbell in 1826, ended tragically. His bride, who had been in poor health, died just a few days after the ceremony. [He married Margaret Winston Jones of Virginia in 1838].
Towns moved to Talbotton in 1828 and served as one of its first commissioners. He was also one of the first attorneys in the new town, owning a very successful practice. He was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1829 and 1830. He served in the state senate from 1832-1834. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1835 but resigned in 1836 over concerns that the legislature might be forced to pick a Whig as President in the upcoming election. Instead, a Whig won Towns’s seat, but he successfully won re-election to the seat in 1837 and served until 1839. He continued to practice law and served one more term in Congress, in 1846, but lost re-election to John W. Jones, a Whig.
In 1847, Towns was elected governor of Georgia in a highly contested race against the Whig candidate, Duncan L. Clinch. He served until 1851 and died in Macon in 1854.
The house is also known as the Towns-Persons-Page House. After Towns left the governorship and moved to Macon [circa 1852], the house was sold to the Persons family, who occupied it until 1968, when it was purchased by the Gary Page family.
James Averette Bryan (1801-1847) and his wife Catherine Holloway Rix Bryan (1803-1861) were pioneer settlers of the long forgotten Wilna community. James A. Bryan migrated to Georgia from North Carolina, settling first in Twiggs County, and later in Houston. He was instrumental in the establishment of Houston County and in the layout of Perry [originally Wattsville]. Bryan originally built a log dogtrot house [pictured above] from timbers cut and milled on a site a few miles from Mulberry Grove. The original homestead was later occupied by Bryan’s oldest son, Dr. Robert Campbell Bryan, and his wife Eliza. [It survives but is not accessible to the public]. As his fortunes improved, Bryan constructed a more formal dwelling, known as Mulberry Grove, circa 1832* [pictured below, and in all subsequent photographs]. *-Some sources date the house to 1850, but discussions with two architectural historians and preservationists support the earlier date.
Mulberry Grove later became the home of Bryan’s third son, Abner Council Bryan and his wife, Harriet Taylor Bryan. Their son, John Averette Bryan and his wife, Linda Lee Bryan, eventually inherited it. Many members of the Bryan family are buried in an adjacent private cemetery, alongside the slaves who built and worked the plantation.
The most notable feature of the house is the rain porch [also referred to as a Carolina rain porch]. Originally, there were only four stucco-covered posts but at some point two more were added for stability. Rain porches are a very rare architectural element in Georgia.
The original kitchen is attached to the house by an enclosed breezeway. The addition of modern steps are one of the few overall modifications visible at the rear of the house.
Rear elevation, from the southeast. Note the double chimney
PLEASE NOTE: Mulberry Grove is private property and is monitored closely by physical and digital means. I am grateful to have been invited by the new owner to photograph the property. He is very interested in making accurate historical renovations to the house and I believe he will be a good steward.
This transitional antebellum house is among the oldest standing in Houston County. I haven’t found the slave schedules for this property but it’s most likely there were enslaved people working on this plantation, and that they were involved in the home’s construction.
This sandstone enclosure is the de facto memorial to one of early Georgia’s best known politicians, Governor George Michael* Troup (8 September 1780-26 April 1856). The obelisk was placed in 1848 upon the death of Troup’s brother, Robert Lachlan Troup (1784-1848). The enclosure was built by slaves from sandstone quarried nearby at Berry Hill Bluff of the Oconee River.
Detail of engraving of George Troup from The Life of George M. Troup by Edward Jenkins Harden, 1859. Public domain.
Governor Troup spent most of his time after his 1833 retirement at Val d’ Osta, his home in Dublin. He died while visiting Rosemont Plantation, one of numerous properties he owned in Laurens and Montgomery counties. A man of his time, Troup was a fierce supporter of slavery, owning around 400 human beings during his lifetime. It is also suggested that, like many slave owners, he fathered children with some of his female slaves.
Troup served as a state representative, member of the House of Representatives, United States senator, and two-term governor of Georgia (1823-1827). Georgia’s best-known politician of the era, William Harris Crawford, encouraged Troup to run for governor. His first run was unsuccessful, due largely to the deep divide between the aristocratic planter class (by now known as Troupites) and the common farmers and frontier settlers (known as Clarkites, for John Clark) that had dominated state politics since the late 18th century. The state largely favored the Clarkites, but when Clark chose not to run in 1823, Troup was elected as an alternative. As a Democratic-Republican governor he ensured the removal of the Creek peoples from Georgia, a dubious achievement from a modern perspective. His endorsement of the Treaty of Indian Springs was met with an amended version from President John Quincy Adams, who favored allowing the Creeks slightly more land, but Troup ordered the militia to enforce his version. President Adams capitulated, not wanting to go to “war” with Troup over the Indian issue. He eventually became a strong Jacksonian Democrat and was nationally recognized for being a champion of states’ rights.
The ornamental iron gate was designed by Savannah blacksmiths D. & W. Rose.
Governor Troup was the namesake of Troup County, and Troupville, the first permanent county seat of Lowndes County. The present county seat of Lowndes County, Valdosta, is named for his plantation, Val d’ Osta.
This imposing Greek Revival plantation home, situated on a high point overlooking acres of gently rolling hills and pristine farmland, was built by William Jackson for his son, John Swinney Jackson and his first wife, Artemesia Hall. The elder Jackson acquired the property from William Knowles in 1832. John Jackson, who had lived all of his life in Hancock and Greene Counties developed the property, through slave labor, into a thriving agricultural operation. At the outset of the Civil War, Jackson owned over 1000 acres and 38 enslaved Africans. Like most Georgians, Jackson served the Confederate cause and the futile effort ended in his loss of the plantation. It was purchased by Robert M. Grimes in 1870 who sold it to James M. Harris in 1874. Grimes reacquired it in 1880, but after a lawsuit over debts sold it back to Harris in 1881. Harris sold it to Henry Thomas Lewis in 1900. Lewis was an Associate Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court who lived in Greensboro and Siloam, keeping the plantation as a country retreat. After Lewis’s death, his widow sold the plantation to Jeff W. N. Lanier, whose family owned neighboring lands. Subsequent owners were D. B. Taylor and Dorsey L. Campbell. Campbell’s daughter, Alice Hartley, deeded the house back to the Lanier family in 1982.
The property is known today as Shoulderbone Plantation, for the historical Shoulderbone Creek which runs nearby.
There is a small section of an original tabby wall on the right of the drive into the modern gated community at Hampton Point Plantation. Owners at some point incorporated tabby fencing (the lower section to the right).
On the left of the entrance to the gated community is a much larger section of tabby wall. (Detail below)
One of the great landmarks of Federal architecture in Georgia, this highly stylized brick I-house may be unique in the state. This house type is much more common in Virginia and, to a lesser extent, North Carolina but this is the only one I’ve encountered in my travels in rural Georgia. The dedication of family members and later guardians to preserve the house has been central to its continued survival.
James Allen Daniel, Jr., (1740-1821) was born in Prince Edward County, Virginia. With brothers John, William, and David, James migrated through the Carolinas and served as a dragoon in the American Revolution during this time. James was one of three Daniel brothers who married three Cunningham sisters of Amelia County, Virginia [James married Elizabeth Cunningham (1749-1819) in 1767]. In 1791 he was among the early settlers of Wilkes County and one of the fathers of the Presbyterian church in the eastern Piedmont region. Family records indicate that James built the home for his son Cunningham (1768-1839) but may have occupied the property until his death. From Cunningham the home passed to his son James Ewing Daniel; from James Ewing Daniel to his daughter Frances Daniel Dillard; and finally to Frances Dillard’s son, Roy Dillard, who was the last Daniel descendant to occupy the house (1954). The house was unoccupied until 1967 when Roy Dillard’s heirs sold it to the David and Diana Blackburn, who subsequently named it “Kettle Creek Manor” for the three branches of Kettle Creek which run through the property and the nearby Revolutionary War battle site of the same name.
Built for Ephraim G. Ponder, a slave trader, this house originally featured a square cupola at the center of the roof. At the time he built this house, Ponder enslaved the Flipper family and, according to the National Park Service: [one of their children], Henry Ossian Flipper (1856-1940), was born enslaved on March 21, 1856, in Thomasville, Georgia, to Festus and Isabella Flipper. [This suggests that Henry was born on these grounds and lived here until the family moved to Atlanta]. Festus Flipper was a shoemaker and carriage trimmer. Flipper’s parents were enslaved by different men when his father’s enslaver decided to move to Atlanta. Henry’s father used all his savings to successfully petition his enslaver to buy his son and wife so the three could remain together.
After the Civil War, the Flipper family stayed in Atlanta, where Festus set up a shoemaking shop. Education was important to the Flipper family. Henry attended schools for Black students established by the American Missionary Association, a nondenominational group of Christian abolitionists. He attended Atlanta University, an all-Black school also founded by the American Missionary Association, before taking the entrance exam for West Point.
Flipper was the first black cadet to be admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point, in 1877.
Detail of albumen cabinet card of Lieutenant Henry Flipper by Kennedy of Wilberforce, Ohio, circa 1877. Courtesy U.S. House of Representatives. Committee on Military Affairs. Public domain.
He earned a commission as a second lieutenant in the U. S. Army. He was also the first black officer to lead the Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry. He went on to serve in the Apache Wars and Victorio’s War but was troubled by rumors that led to his eventual court martial and discharge. He continued to work for the United States, as an assistant to the Secretary of the Interior in Mexico and Central America. Flipper’s family sought and received a complete pardon in 1999. It’s a nice irony that the slave trader is largely forgotten today while Mr. Flipper is honored with an annual award in his name at West Point.
Dawson Street Residential Historic District, National Register of Historic Places
