It’s been 45 years or so, but Dr. Thomas Newton Guffin Jr. vividly recalls seeing hoof prints on the floor of a dilapidated mansion that were made by cavalrymen under Gen. William T. Sherman who were horsing around inside the building after the Battle of Atlanta.
Guffin, a 58-year-old ear, nose and throat doctor in Smyrna, also remembers that “death to all traitors” had been carved on a column at the front of the imposing southwest Atlanta structure, built in 1859 by his great-grandfather William Asbury Wilson and now on the National Register of Historic Places.
And Guffin also recalls sleeping in the building as a child, when it was still a plush mansion.
Since 1963, however, after going through a succession of owners, the house — one of only three antebellum mansions left in Atlanta — has all but fallen down, and is dangerous to even enter, says Boyd Coons, head of the Atlanta Preservation Center, who wants to rescue it.
So does Guffin, in part because when the 75 acres surrounding the house were sold along with the structure, the family cemetery was not, and he has the key. It contains about 40 graves of prominent Atlantans, including some associated with the High Museum and Collier Road.
The cemetery, Guffin says, is still live. His father is buried there, and he plans to be, too, near many other ancestors.
Despite its dilapidated condition, Coons says, “this is not a lost cause. We want to save it.”
The question is how. He’s had experts examine it to see what saving it would take.
The acreage was purchased most recently for $5 million by Arberg Properties, which plans to turn the remains of an old hospital on the grounds into a medical research complex.
Eric Riesenberg, one of the partners, recently had the vines and trees that covered the old mansion removed. He would like to see the mansion saved, too, but says his company is not in the preservation business.
Coons, who with volunteer Hoke Kimball has met with Riesenberg, says the APC is in the process now of finding a way to “mothball” it.
“My husband grew up in that house,” says Betty Guffin, Dr. Guffin’s mother. “It’s one of the houses that Sherman’s troops stayed in.”
That’s not just legend. According to federal documents, Union troops occupied the house just before Atlanta fell on Sept. 2, 1864. It also served as Sherman’s headquarters for a time. Dr. Guffin says the house was considered as a model for Tara in “Gone With the Wind” and was a typical, “magnificent” Greek Revival structure. The plantation was one of the largest in the area before the Civil War.
Coons, 60, who has a master’s in architectural history from the University of Virginia, is a seventh generation Atlantan, and says the Wilson House “expresses an unique sense of place’’ and is culturally very significant.
Kimball, also 60, says “it is important for any city to remember its heritage and try and preserve physical artifacts from the past.”
Coons says it’s necessary first to have a goal, then to figure out how to accomplish it.
“Saving an 1859 masonry structure which housed a Yankee general would say a lot more about Atlanta and Atlantans than, say, a brand new football stadium,” says historian and author Steve Davis. “Like, where are our priorities?”
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