From the archives: This story was originally published in The Atlanta Constitution on August 27, 1985.
ATHENS - For 155 years, the T.R.R. Cobb house, former home of the principal author of the Confederate Constitution, occupied a prestigious address on the same street as many of Athens' antebellum mansions.
Built in 1830 and purchased by Georgia Supreme Court Justice Joseph Henry Lumpkin in 1842, the house was apparently a wedding present for Lumpkin's daughter, Marion, and her husband, Thomas Reeds Rootes Cobb, who was also a co-founder of the University of Georgia Law School.
Now, the house is on its way to Stone Mountain Memorial Park. Tuesday two trucks will start carrying two 60-ton sections of the main house to the park. Workmen Monday moved the house's distinctive twin octagonal wings to a gas station on U.S. 78 where they will remain until the main sections are in place near the plantation complex at the park.
Before Stone Mountain Park stepped in and offered to move it, the Cobb House on Prince Avenue, which predates the Taylor-Grady house and the University of Georgia president's mansion, was in danger of being demolished.
The previous owner, St. Joseph's Catholic Church, had used it as a parish house and rectory and had spent $80,000 to keep it functional over the past 10 years. Unwilling to spend more, the church's building and development board offered to sell it for $1 to anyone who would move it off church property.
When local preservationists weren't able to find an alternate site for the house in Athens or a buyer willing to sink several hundred thousand dollars into moving and restoring the old home, Stone Mountain Park accepted the challenge.
"We're looking at two possibilities for the Cobb house, a walk- through attraction or a bed-and-breakfast inn, " said Bob Cowhig, director of park operations, who estimates it will cost $70,000 to move the house and at least $400,000 to restore it.
The cost of moving and restoring the house will come strictly from park profits, said Cowhig, who estimates that the newly remodeled Cobb house will open in midsummer of 1986.
"It's appropriate that it's over there, " says Milton Leathers, who, as president of the Athens-Clarke County Heritage Foundation, led the fight to keep the Cobb house in Athens. "I feel better about it all the time."
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