Buy a town? Much of historical Gay to hit the market.

An unusual offering is hitting the market: the chance to own a controlling interest in a tiny Georgia town.

A significant chunk of Gay, a rural hamlet about 60 miles south of downtown Atlanta, in Meriwether County, soon will be listed for sale for $13.5 million.

Atlanta architect Keith Summerour and his family are selling the assemblage of land and historic 19th century buildings, such as an old cotton gin. The property spans about 64 acres and 17 buildings, including commercial storefronts, hospitality venues, residential properties and agricultural land.

“It really is this preserved small town that is like stepping back into history,” said Harrison Summerour, son of Keith Summerour and an agent with Ansley Real Estate Christie’s International, which is listing the property.

The listing is expected to go live Friday.

Gay, population of about 110, may be tiny, but it’s had its share of the spotlight. The town has been a filming location for horror drama “The Walking Dead” and makeover show “Queer Eye,” along with movies such as “The War,” starring Kevin Costner.

Gay is also home to luxury resort Quercus, which this year earned one of the highest accolades in global hospitality, and Big Red Oak Plantation, a hunting preserve and sporting clays facility.

“There are a lot of movers and shakers in the area that have come down here into this little town to escape Atlanta and have their place to be,” Harrison Summerour said.

Gay's historical building are also for sale. (Courtesy of Bonneau & Co.)

The property for sale includes the grounds of a biannual festival called The Cotton Fair, which includes a collection of sheds and pole barns, some that date back to the 1920s, according to property records.

The historical buildings are remnants of the town’s past.

Gay originally was a hub for growing cotton and packing peaches. But when the agricultural industry slowed in the 1970s, the buildings were repurposed for festival use. The Cotton Fair, once called the Cotton Pickin’ Fair, features handmade goods, antiques and live music, attracting about 60,000 visitors a year.

“Gay represents something increasingly difficult to find in America: authenticity,” Keith Summerour said in a prepared statement. He is the founder of Summerour & Associates Architects, which specializes in custom homes and boutique hospitality projects. The Atlanta firm has worked on projects such as Blackberry Farm in Tennessee and the renovation of Old Edwards Inn and Spa in Highlands, North Carolina.

“The buildings, the streets, the agricultural landscape, and the stories embedded in this place were not created for tourism; they evolved naturally over generations,” Keith Summerour said of Gay. “The opportunity is not to reinvent Gay, but to thoughtfully steward its history while helping it reach its full potential as one of the South’s most distinctive rural destinations.”

Also included in the sale is Towerhouse Farm & Brewery, a craft brewery and taproom that generates more than $500,000 in annual revenue, according to an offering memorandum. Other holdings include a gas station.

Towerhouse Farm & Brewery is part of the offering. (Courtesy of Bonneau & Co.)

The Summerour family acquired the property during the COVID-19 pandemic, Harrison Summerour said. The family has owned farmland in the town for more than two decades, he said, and while cooped up on the property during the health crisis, they started brewing beer from shipped-in grain and honey harvested on the farm.

That soon led to a beer stand on the family property.

“It just, like, exploded,” he said. “People from all over were coming just because they didn’t have anything else to do.”

When the family learned that members of the community’s founding family were looking to sell their stake in the town, Harrison Summerour said they found an opportunity to open a brewery, transforming a circa-1911 retail store.

“Next thing you know is, all these other properties around us started going up for sale,” he said, and the family added to its holdings, including the gas station and adjacent timber and farm land. They have worked to transform residential buildings into short-term rentals, he added.

Another structure included in the assemblage. (Courtesy of Bonneau & Co.)

But after six years of running the fair and brewery, the family wants to pass the torch, he said.

“We have done everything that we think we can do to it,” Harrison Summerour said. “There’s a lot of opportunity for development on that site, but we have decided that we want to go focus on our farm a little bit more and expand our wedding operations over there.”

The property does not have any historic protections, he said. This is one of the reasons the Gay fairgrounds landed on The Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation’s “Places in Peril” list in 2022.