When they began planning "Gone With the Wind," movie scouts turned their gaze on an old house south of downtown Atlanta. Was it magnificent enough to be a model for Tara?
The structure had an elegant façade, with its columns and double-deck porches. It was old enough, too. The house even had Civil War history: Men in blue are reputed to have stayed in the home during the Battle of Atlanta.
Still, it lacked a certain grandeur to inspire the mansion where Scarlett O'Hara drove the young men nuts. When the movie debuted in 1939, the fictional Tara was based on larger houses from the antebellum period. The house on Fairburn Road was forgotten.
Decades came, decades went. Window panes broke. Rain found its way through the roof. Vines and bushes wrapped the home in a green embrace. In time, the only residents of the Greek Revival home were those that crawled, flew or slithered.
Now, the stone house that Judge William Asbury Wilson built between 1856 and 1859 faces another threat. Atlanta city officials have ordered extensive repairs to the house. The owner has to appear in court Aug. 11 to explain if those fixes haven't been completed.
So far, most of them haven’t. The house’s long-term future is in limbo.
“I don’t want to be the guy who makes that call” to demolish the structure, said Eric Riesenberg, a managing member of Arberg Properties LLC, an Atlanta property-management firm that owns the house. The structure is part of a 75-acre tract that includes the Atlanta Medical Research Center, formerly a hospital.
Acting on a complaint, a city inspector visited the house April 20. The house, he wrote, was overrun with weeds; was missing bricks in its foundation; and had a roof that had partially collapsed. Repairs, the inspector said, had to commence by April 25; they should have been completed by May 10.
So far, Riesenberg said, crews have cut back weeds. “I personally helped put a tarp on the roof,” he said.
Those are but stopgap measures, Riesenberg said. He has “no idea” how much it would cost to restore the mansion.
The Wilson house is only the latest historic structure to face an uncertain future. The city of Smyrna recently ordered the demolition of the Hooper-Turner house, another Civil War-era structure, when no one stepped forward to buy it.
Preservationists say the Wilson house is only one of a handful of antebellum-style homes left in Atlanta. It’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The mansion’s current diminished state belies its regal past. It was built by one of Atlanta’s early settlers, who created one of the largest plantations in the Atlanta area. Workers made the exterior walls with fieldstone and mortar. They built a two-story portico with a second-floor porch. Stately columns announced that a man of means lived behind its solid walls.
It was nice enough, apparently, for another man of means. According to historians, Union Gen. William T. Sherman used it as temporary headquarters during the Battle of Atlanta. The owner was elsewhere, serving with the Georgia Volunteer Infantry.
Over the years it housed Wilson’s descendants. In 1962, the family sold it to Holy Family Hospital (later Southwest Community Hospital), which used it as nurses’ quarters.
In 2014, Arberg Properties bought Southwest Community Hospital and began converting it into the medical research facility. Part of the package was the Wilson house, unoccupied and falling apart.
The house is in bad shape, admitted Hoke Kimball, a volunteer with the Atlanta Preservation Center. The center, Kimball said, would like to “reduce” the house, removing the remains of the roof and shoring up its walls.
“It would be like a monument,” he said.
Like Riesenberg, Kimball isn’t sure it would make economic sense to try restoring the home. The center plans to have a contractor survey the structure and make recommendations to make it more stable.
But, even in its battered condition, “you can see that it was really a lovely place,” Kimball said.
Riesenberg and Kimball hope to get an extension from the city to make more repairs. Atlanta officials say the issue is headed to court. A judge, they say, will be the one to decide how much time the Wilson mansion has.
“The city is treating this like a house with a bad roof,” Kimball said. “It’s not treating the house as a historic structure.”
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