Smyrna City Council is scheduled Monday to decide on the winning bid for the acquisition and relocation of Aunt Fanny’s Cabin.
After extending the deadline for requests for proposals to March 16, the city received four proposals for the controversial structure, but only three met the city’s criteria. Council members are scheduled to vote on the proposals during a regular meeting at 7 p.m. Monday.
Smyrna is offering the cabin for free, but the bidder must pay the expense of moving the condemned building located at 2875 Atlanta Road.
Aunt Fanny’s Cabin is a former restaurant that closed in 1992 but has been criticized for presenting stereotypes of Black people. The servers were Black boys who wore wooden menu boards around their necks. Framed slave advertisements reportedly decorated the walls.
The restaurant opened in the 1940s and was named after Fanny Williams, a longtime servant of the Campbell family who were the original owners of the establishment and among the first settlers in Smyrna. The restaurant became known for its Southern cooking, often using Williams’ recipes.
Williams is remembered for telling stories while sitting in a rocking chair on the cabin porch.
In her personal life, she was a civil rights activist who spoke out against the Ku Klux Klan and helped to raise money to build the state’s first all-Black hospital in Marietta, as well as Atlanta’s Wheat Street Baptist Church where she was a member. Williams died in 1949.
