Q: The Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Administrative Building at Georgia Tech, Graves Hall at Morehouse College and the eponymous Agnes Scott Hall share the same style of architecture, and each has a striking tower. Were they designed by the same architect?
—Teri Anulewicz, Smyrna
A: You have a keen eye.
All three remarkable buildings are similar in style and were built about the same time.
Alexander Bruce and Thomas Henry Morgan, who formed Bruce and Morgan, Atlanta’s reknowned architectural firm, designed both Georgia Tech’s Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Administrative Building and Agnes Scott Hall.
Graves Hall’s designer is a mystery, it seems.
The architect is listed as unknown on websites for the Atlanta Urban Design Commission and the Council of Independent Colleges’ Historic Campus Architecture Project.
There are plenty of other details.
The building was finished in 1889, which makes it the oldest building on campus.
Graves Hall cost $27,000 and was built in about eight months. The four-story building “exhibits the typical high Victorian mixture of facade materials and ornamental details, including terra-cotta panels, pigmented brick panels and eave brackets,” AUDC’s website states.
You might know the Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Administrative Building better as Tech Tower. Built in 1888, it was the first building at Georgia Tech.
Agnes Scott Hall, simply called “Main,” opened in 1891 and also is the oldest building on campus.
If anyone has any information into who built Graves Hall, please let me know.
More info on Fannin
Last week’s Actual Factual column detailed Georgia native James Fannin’s role and death in the Texas Revolution.
I wrote that he had attended the University of Georgia in the early 19th century, which is mentioned in more than one of Fannin’s online bios.
It seems there’s no absolute evidence linking Fannin with UGA.
Trey Hood, a political science professor at UGA, has done exhaustive research on the subject and has found only one letter of recommendation that connects Fannin to a unnamed school in Athens.
No one is sure if it was UGA or a prep school connected to the college.
A fire in the early 20th century wiped out many of the university’s enrollment records. The UGA archivist’s research also hasn’t turned up anything.
So the case of Fannin and UGA remains open.
“I’m not sure we’ll find any other evidence to close it,” Hood said.
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