Muscogee County GaArchives Photo Place.....The Early Architecture Of Georgia(Peacock Woods) ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/gafiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Christine Thacker http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00033.html#0008100 May 9, 2007, 11:00 am Source: Sesquicentennial Supplement III, Ledger- Enquirer Photo can be seen at: http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/muscogee/photos/theearly12780gph.jpg Image file size: 106.9 Kb Overly-Romantic View Has Slighted Fine Quality Georgia Architecture By William R. Mitchell Jr. Guest Columnist "One can easily, imagine the, original town as seen from the river, then its principal entrance, with the dominant courthouse framed on each side by church spires, the whole surrounded by trees and large parks at each end of the town. Recreation was provided for by the ‘Public Promenade,' which extended along the banks of the river from the South Common to the boatyard and the wharf. Farther back from the river, but also in the South Common was the 'Race Course.' Certainly the town's surveyor, Edward L. Thomas, laid out a functional and beautiful town." Describing Columbus in the 1850s, Frederick D. Nichols; "The Early Architecture of Georgia, 1957." Architecture has been one of Georgia's most popular artistic achievements, a tradition that continues even today with the work of Atlanta's John Portman. Architecture has been one of Georgia's most significant cultural accomplishments and is a tremendously interesting three-dimensional record of our state's historical development, from colony to modern day. This monograph will concern the 100 years from the founding of Columbus in 1828 to its centennial in 1928. Yet, architecture has been the least understood aspect of our cultural heritage. Misconceptions are numerous and the failure to appreciate the architectural history of Georgia for other than romantic reasons has been typical. For example, the most widely known and delightfully readable book about the subject concerns only domestic architecture - houses - built before the Civil War. Called "White Columns in Georgia," it was written by, Medora Field Perkerson, an Atlanta newspaperwoman, and published in 1952. "White Columns" features among others, a Greek Revival house built in 1840, Bulloch Hall, in Roswell; just north of Atlanta. But in fact the beautifully proportioned classical columns of this temple-form mansion originally were not white, but painted to resemble Sienna marble. More importantly perhaps is that even though Bulloch Hall is a deservedly famous antebellum Georgia house- recently restored by a native Columbusite - it was not the manor on an isolated cotton plantation miles from any neighbors (like Twelve Oaks In "Gone With the Wind”) but a town house in a textile manufacturing village organized around a church and a green town square. Furthermore, “ Sherman did not burn it down.” One of the reason's the Hall survives is because General Kenner Garrard carried out Sherman's orders to the letter, burning only the textile facilities near the Chattahoochee. The Hall is only one of a complex of buildings in Roswell, many of which are assuredly "antebellum" since they were built before the War Between the States. But otherwise, Bulloch Hall and Roswell fit few if any preconceptions about Georgia architecture and life "before the War." This same analysis applies to Georgia's antebellum capital, Milledgeville, which the Legislature planned and placed near the state's geographic center in 1803', much as it would later locate Columbus on the Chattahoochee, Georgia's frontier. Milledgeville is a beautifully designed town with five squares and a gridiron street pattern. Capitol Square holds the first civic building in America (1805) to be designed in the Gothic Revival style, an ornamental mode which displays castle-like battlements, pointed arches and stucco-ed walls. With not a column in sight, nor any white lead paint. Near the Capitol is an Executive Mansion, as it was called, built in 1838 and designed by Charles B. Cluskey, which does have a two-story front portico consisting of stone pillars in the Ionic Order, but not columns of wood painted white. It has a fine formal plan organized around a central rotunda all in all, one .of the most architecturally sophisticated Governor's mansions ever built in America, with a design purity and classical formality that is in feeling Italian Renaissance, rather than Greek Revival. The Governor's Mansion is a rare Palladian Revival landmark of the American Classical Revival. It, the Gothic Revival Capitol and the town plan collectively speak the message clearly that, though Georgia in 1838 might have been a largely rural and agricultural society in the process of settlement and though its settlements were widely spaced from one another, Georgia was not a backwoods place in its civilized aspirations and hopes for the future. As James Longstreet Sibley Jennings; an architectural historian originally from Milledgeville, has said: "The old Georgia' capital of Milledgeville is one of America's few entirely Federal period cities, with an unequaled collection of classical revival and other early building styles. It should be known as the Williamsburg of the Early Republic. White columns in Georgia also cannot be used to describe any of the architecturally sophisticated buildings designed by William Jay, an English- trained architect who worked in Savannah from 1817 to 1824. In fact, Savannah is not a white-columned town. Jay's columns were not designed to be painted but stained; many of them were of stone, and, in several instances of cast-iron. His building were of brick covered in stucco, colored resemble Italian villas, called "Regency" in style. there are none comparable in early American architecture; one of them, the Richardson-Owen's-Thomas House, has the first major use of cast-iron in American architecture: an entire columned porch-balcony and painted a shade of beige called “Stone-Color.” In Macon, just prior to the Civil War, a leading New York architect designed an American version of an Italian Renaissance style townhouse for a couple who had just returned from their honeymoon in Italy. Possibly the finest antebellum house built in Georgia, it now belongs to the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation and is a National Landmark open to the public. The Johnston-Hay House is in no way what one might expect to find in Scarlett O'Hara's Georgia since its exceptional architectural presence depends very little if at all on columns, white or otherwise. This is not to say that Macon doesn't have some outstanding temple-like houses. One of them, Overlook, the B. P. O'Neal house (c. 1840) may be the finest Greek Revival house in Georgia but, like Bulloch Hall and the Johnston- Hay House, its near neighbor, it is hot out in the country but on a superb and lofty building site in town. Like Columbus, Macon was planned with great care under the auspices of what must have been ,one of the most urban-design oriented state legislatures in American history. One last example of how the fine quality of architecture in Georgia has often been slighted by an overly romantic viewpoint, is the work of the until recent1y unknown See HOMES, Page S-11 Continued From Page S-18 John S. Norris, an architect who came to Savannah in 1846 as designer and superintendent of the United States Custom House, a building completed in 1848. Norris designed columns of an exceedingly rare version of the Corinthian Temple-of-the-Winds, which are anything but white since the building material chosen was a medium dark gray granite shipped from the famous stone quarries of Quincy, Massachusetts. Norris stayed in Savannah and helped to create the city's present architectural character, which as Mills Lane has shown in his "Savannah Revisited" is not the brand of classicism that people expect to see. The characteristic look there are rows of two-story townhouses of "Savannah Grey Bricks" overlooking a series of old I tree-shaded residential squares. The distinctive perhaps unique qualities of architecture in Georgia have usually defied definition and analysis and are left out of the general histories (the new "History of Georgia," published in 1917, has only one paragraph on architecture in over 300 pages) because the subject has been so over popularized in the legendary literary mythology that only one serious scholar has had the nerve to try. In 1957, Frederick Doveton Nichols of the University of Virginia's School of Architecture published a very important volume, "The Early Architecture of Georgia," which has since been revised and republished. But, alas, Nichols is an absentee. architectural historian who deals only with antebellum architecture as though nothing happened in Georgia after 1865 worthy of serious attention. He fails, therefore; to capture the full range and spirit of Georgia architecture. But he does provide an invaluable text for the period 1733-1865. The most distinctive characteristic of architecture in Georgia is the way that brilliantly personal and individualistic landmarks - "follies" almost - have been created over and over again on our far southern frontier of Eastern Seaboard cultural life; the way Georgia architecture has had such a strong urban tradition that one might almost call Georgia the "urban rural” state; the way its major architecural monuments are in towns and not out in the plantation countryside; the way railroads and textile manufacturing plants before "The War" were making Georgia "The Empire State of the South," giving the towns a national rather than a sectional appearance; the way Georgia has attracted and demanded good architecture and civil engineering, architects, engineers and craftsmen: men like William Jay and Daniel Pratt in the 1820s and 30s; men like Charles Cluskey, John Norris, John Wind of Thomasville and Willis Ball of Roswell in the 1840s and 50s, men like Will H. Parkins. L. P. Grant and Richard Peters. all rebuilding Atlanta in the 1860s and 70s, G. L. Norrman and William G. Preston in the 1870s, 80s and 90s, and then Neel Reid and Philip Trammell Shutze in the early 20th Century. (More research into the names of early architects, builders, contractors and craftsmen working in Georgia is needed, as well as documentation of individual buildings.) Even though Georgia was the youngest of the 13 original, colonies, the fartherest south on the Eastern Seaboard and defeated in the Civil War, it has been an architectural crossroads, outpost and leader. Take, for example, those weird marbelized columns on Bulloch Hall at Roswell. a New England-like mill town built just as the Indians were removed; the unique double- octagonal "Folly" in Columbus; the extraordinary Springer Opera House, a late 19th century cultural center with a hotel attached; the extraordinarily outstanding cast-iron bank at 11th and Broadway shipped to Columbus, from Pittsburgh, a genuine commercial palazzo; the aforementioned landmarks at Milledgeville, a Federal period town carved out of the upcountry Georgia wilderness to serve as a capital city; a house in downtown Augusta called Ware's Folly. described by the author of "Noted American Houses" as "a unique native variety of the Adam Style" and pictured as a prototype American Federal house in "American Architecture Since 1780, a Guide to the Styles;" at Americus, a High Victorian period hotel, the Windsor House, designed by Atlanta architect, G. L. Norrman, which ought to rank nationally for picturesque Victorian taste and is the major landmark of downtown Americus, taking up an entire city block. Also from the Victorian 1880s, a new State 'Capitol building in Atlanta, patterned after the U.S. Capitol and, in 1974, declared a National Landmark in architecture because its Renaissance Revival style and the superb engineering of its dome exemplify Georgia's post-Civil War thrust to rejoin the Union And in Atlanta at that time, was Georgia's first skyscraper designed by a Lumpkin, Ga., native, John Wellborn Root (1850-1891). The old Trust Company of Georgia, now destroyed, was Root's last design, his first and only in Georgia and the finest early skyscraper in the South. He and his partner in Chicago had helped to originate skyscraper architecture after that city's Great Fire. The Atlanta project's progenitor was Joel Hurt, originally from Hurtsboro, Alabama, And, lastly, the work of Philip Trammel Shutze, born in Columbus in 1890, who has been called "The greatest living classical architect in America," Shutze represents a whole era of professional architects. By the time he began to practice in the second decade of this century, architects were college-trained and had not come up in the building trades as had so many in the 19th century. Perhaps the best example of Shutze's work is the Edward H. Inman home, Swan House, in suburban Atlanta, now a house museum belonging to the Atlanta Historical Society. Swan House can represent a whole era of well-designed, handcrafted "period houses" usually built in the suburbs of older cities. Completed in 1928, the year of the Columbus Centennial, Swan House is an English Palladian composition which exemplifies the personality, beauty ,and national importance' of Georgia architecture. Each of these and innumerable more buildings throughout the state add up to an architectural heritage whose true worth cannot be over-estimated, a heritage so rich that the truth is more wonderful than fiction. In 1825, when the Marquis de Lafayette visited Savannah and spoke, from a side balcony on the Richardson-Owens-Thomas House, he may not have known that every classical column and ornament, every, acanthus-leaf and console support was iron, not wood or stone. No other porch in America could have sup ported the Revolutionary War hero more elegantly, nor in such an up-to-date fashion. Georgia architecture is more than white columns seen through magnolia trees lighted by moonlight (or by Hollywood kleig lights) or as smoking ruins silhouetted abjectedly against eroded red clay cotton fields, deserves to be known. The design of the town of Savannah in 1733 began this pattern of brilliantly individualistic architectural accomplishments far from the accepted centers of early American culture. With the help of King George II and a Board of Trustees, James Edward Oglethorpe created the last English colony in America. He arrived in 1733 to begin the work of laying out a planned colonial capital on a bluff overlooking the Savannah River. His conception, which the urban design authority John Reps has called "The most splendid urban design in America," was declared a National Landmark in 1966. Oglethorpe's Savannah was on the southernmost frontier of English speaking America, surrounded by a total wilderness, with Indians still roaming and hostile Spanish soldiers to the south. This remarkable town plan set a precedent in Georgia which in spirit continued to be carried out as settlements proceeded west. This precedent came to its most significant fruition in 1828 when Georgia's western frontier was closed by the founding and design of Columbus on a bluff above the Chattahoochee River. Of the plan of Columbus Nichols has written: "Here is a superb example of a well-designed early 19th century town. Manufacturing and transportation are along the river, yet part of the river front is devoted to recreation and the business area lies between the residential and industrial sections. The religious and educational squares break the monotony of the residential blocks, yet they are convenient to the seat of government. A portion of this original town design can be seen most clearly in the area which has been nationally registered as an historic district. Linwood Cemetery is on the northern edge of this layout and was part of the original plan. The southern end of the plan was the Chattahoochee where it turns eastward near the present Naval Museum; the river to the high water mark on the Alabama side was the Westward boundary and present day 10th Avenue was on the east, (Professor Nichols neglected to mention that the original common-land was a greenbelt which surrounded the town not only on the south, but on the east and north, with Linwood Cemetery, being in the North Common.) Within these boundaries was a gridiron street pattern with broad streets and avenues and a park-like median running the length of Broadway and several other avenues. Similar to Savannah in spirit, it was closer even in fact to the then Capital at Milledgeville where the State Legislature and Governor John Forsyth conceived the idea of Columbus as a trading town on the falls of the Chattahoochee. Direct responsibility for the town's design goes to the five commissioners Forsyth appointed and to the surveyor and Methodist minister, Edward Lloyd Thomas, who later surveyed and laid out Oxford, Georgia as the home of Emory College. (Its first president, Ignatius Few, was one of Forsyth's five Commissioners. The others were Dr. Edwin L. DeGraffenreid, Philip H. Alston, Elias Beall, and James Hallam.) Columbus, then, was the Savannah of the 19th Century, continuing across the Georgia landscape one of America's most important urban design traditions. Those architectually brilliant town plans provided setting for building to serve the needs and express the taste of the people of Georgia. Not until the decades from 1800 to 1840 was the entire state opened for settlement in which these "Rural Urban" towns, villages and county seats could be divised; only then could cultural patterns develop which will still identify as distinctly Georgia's own. Not until the 1820s, 30s, and 40s, even in long-settled coastal Savannah, did the art of architecture flourish in Georgia. Not until the founding of Columbus was the Georgia frontier pushed to the Alabama line and a setting created for some of Georgia's most beautiful and significant architecture, that of Columbus on the Chattahoochee. (Athens, created as the state university town came at about the same time as Milledgeville; Washington-Wilkes had come earlier; Macon in 1823, others about that same time were Lexington, LaGrange, Greensboro, Madison, Eatontol1, Roswell and Thomasville; Augusta had been laid out on the Savannah in 1735. Its plan is very similar to Columbus and along its broad streets is found a collection of 19th century architecture only rivaled by that of Columbus.) From 1828 to 1928, Georgia architecture, to repeat, flourished as a general rule not in the countryside but in well-designed small urban settings, or on the outskirts of these towns in early suburban areas like Wynnton in Columbus, or Summerville in Augusta. Fine rural plantation houses were great exception but even then these were located close to well-traveled main roads, such as Westmoreland near Columbus. The ordinary small Georgia farm house had no columns, only simple pine posts on a shed porch; the best example of these "plain style" Georgia plantations has been restored as a house museum on the grounds of the Atlanta Historical Society, the Tullie Smith House of 1835-40 from Dekalb County. . Georgia has been a place of cultural contrasts, from some of the very plainest to some of the most splendid; all with a curiously native vitality of spirit. This is expressed in the architecture of Georgia as it is in her speech and literature. Dr. William Seale, the Victorian Society in America editor and co-author of "The Temples of Democracy," Once touched on this sentiment when he wrote in a letter: "Personally, as an outsider, I think there is a strange uniqueness about Georgia architecture - it seems expressed in those wild yellow Sienna columns at Bulloch Hall. The situation is, it seems to me, quite as remarkable as that in Louisiana, only it is undiscovered, at least on paper." \' Georgia and Georgians and things Georgian are often spoken of in superlatives or, on the other hand, with invectives, never - or hardly ever - in terms mild and mediocre. Georgia is the largest State on the Atlantic and East of the Mississippi and was the youngest of the 13 original colonies. It was the last to be fully settled as the Cherokee Indians did not leave North Georgia until 1838 and then only because the first gold rush in America was over-running the hills with settlers. How natural therefore that our Georgian in the White House should write "Why Not the Best?" 'That is the Georgia frame of reference: largest, youngest, oldest, first and best. As mentioned earlier, a national authority recently proclaimed Philip Shutze "America's greatest living classical architect." Of course Mr. Shutze is from Georgia and of course he was born in Columbus and assuredly when he was in architectural school he won the nation's most, prestigious prize for architectural students to study at the American Academy in Rome, Italy, and happily he has lived to the very ripe oldest category. Perhaps all of this Georgia chauvanism is explained by the term "Georgia Cracker," a well-worn term for which a modern historian has recently discovered the original meaning-one who is given to boasting, teller of tall tales, a frontiersman and pioneer who made up stories of what he had done, where he had come from, was going and especially about what a great state is Georgia. A graduate student from Georgia attending an eastern university showed one of his professors a slide of the Richardson-Owen-Thomas house in Savannah, William Jay’s masterpiece, The Princeton Ph.D., who had never been to Savannah said: "'Don't show me that lovely and sophisticated house down in Savannah. I’ll just have to change all of my theories about poor old culturally deprived backwoods Georgia Special Sesquicentennial Supplement III Ledger- Enquirer, Sunday, April 30, 1978, pg S-10/11 * The pictures of the homes on pages S10/11 are not mention in the above article of the Newspaper. The Homes are the St. Elmo, Walker- Peters- Langdon House, Bullard- Hart House, The Rankin House. and the Cast -Iron First National Bank. File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/ga/muscogee/photos/theearly12780gph.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/gafiles/ File size: 22.8 Kb