The grand front doorway of Atlanta’s historic L.P. Grant Mansion has been freshly reconstructed in the embodiment of preservation metaphors about portals to the past.
The project “creates that natural gateway from the past to look at the future,” says David Yoakley Mitchell, executive director of the Atlanta Preservation Center (APC), which calls the 1856 Grant Park mansion home and has spent the past 22 years rehabilitating it from near-demolition.
Another metaphor is welcoming the community into what, in many ways, is the home of preservation in Atlanta. Because it took an eclectic community to pull off this part of the mansion’s rescue – including journalists in the 1960s and today’s archivists, restorers and, crucially, kindly neighbors who returned a long-lost piece of hand-painted glass.
Where symbolism and reality really overlap is the endless transition of time from past to present, which makes preservation work neverending and leaves its practitioners still knocking at certain mysteries – in this case, the age of the door itself, which may or may not go back to pre-Civil War times.
The mansion at 327 St. Paul Ave. has played a unique role in the history of the city and its preservation movement. Construction of the three-story Italianate home began in 1854 under the direction of Lemuel Grant, a railroad engineer who became a major real estate speculator and political figure in early Atlanta who donated the land for what is now Grant Park. On behalf of the Confederate city in the Civil War, he led the planning of its fortifications, in which his mansion ended up virtually on a battle line when Atlanta fell in 1864. The home also served as a Confederate hospital.
Spared destruction that affected much of the city under Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, the mansion is believed to be the only pre-war structure that survives in its original location within Atlanta’s city limits at the time. In 1902, the mansion accumulated more local history as the birthplace of legendary amateur golfer Bobby Jones, co-founder of the Masters Tournament.
By the 1940s, the mansion was in disrepair and at risk of that classic Atlanta plague, demolition by neglect. Enter another major historical figure: Margaret Mitchell, the author of the bestselling “Lost Cause” romance “Gone With the Wind.” In 1941, she funded a purchase of the mansion with the intent of seeing it become an Atlanta history museum – an effort that fell apart amid a lawsuit. Meanwhile, the mansion was collapsing, too. More decades of neglect and damage, including a 1970s fire, destroyed the upper two floors and left little more than the stout walls.
Sixty years later, the APC bought the mansion as its new headquarters and began a rehabilitation running over $1 million and counting. Roofs, floors and rehabilitated windows were installed on what is now a one-story structure that partly retains bare-brick walls as scars of its survivor history. It’s painstaking work that involves historical research and the reuse of scrap wood from the collapsed upper stories and interiors, which preservationists have salvaged and stored over the years. It’s also a massive, eternal commitment from the APC, albeit one that has accelerated under the Tasmanian devil-like energy of David Mitchell, who took over as executive director in 2020 and declared to me, “I plan on working on the rest of the thing until I’m fired or die.”
I first met Mitchell outside that historic door during a rainstorm in the spring of 2021. He was dripping wet, a little downpour having not dissuaded him from clambering on the roof to supervise the rehab work, which at that time included the windows. He enthusiastically pointed out to me the intricate details of incorporating wood from elsewhere in the structure into their frames and the intact pieces hand-numbered by long-dead carpenters and glaziers.
The Savannah firm Landmark Preservation conducted the window work and took on the doorway project with a similar level of detail. It was complex work, as the structure includes a massive frame, large transom and sidelights, and the huge, four-panel door.
A fundamental question was the historic status of the door itself. A crucial partial answer came in the chance discovery of a photo in the DeKalb History Center archives by Marissa Howard, the center’s programs and membership coordinator. The black-and-white photo is a close-up of the door, made identifiable by its street number and, coincidentally, a sales sign emphasizing the possibility of historic preservation. “Buy and restore historic L.P. Grant home (1850) [sic], city’s last antebellum mansion,” it reads in part.
The photo is one of 11,000 unlabeled images in a collection donated by Guy Hayes, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution photographer for four decades, from 1940 to 1980. The sign was the only way Howard was able to identify the house in that photo and some other related images that did not include convenient signage. “Finding the image is part serendipitous and part the fun I have identifying unlabeled images,” says Howard. “It’s a puzzle game for me.”
The photo plainly showed – through wood grain, among other cues – that the door was the same as that still on the mansion today. But dating the photo was a whole other matter that took many more months of research. Howard now believes the photo was part of a series taken for a 1966 AJC story package that was an early example of historic preservation advocacy, with photos by Hayes and reporting by Achsah Nesmith, who went on to become a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter.
The stories bemoan the loss of pre-war structures in Atlanta, likening modern “progress” and “urbanization” to the destruction of the “Yankee invaders.” An introduction says that the reporting team’s quest for surviving pre-war houses “found the pickings slim and the conditions often poor… Many others have disappeared within the past two or three years, and no group is currently working to preserve the city’s remaining relics.” The story mentions the Grant Mansion and says its porches fell nearly 20 years earlier.
For the APC and Landmark Preservation, that meant the existing door was nearly 60 years old at least. Other research suggests it could be much older, as its design is identical to basic elevation drawings made by the original architect, Calvin Fay, a popular designer around Georgia’s elite society and institutions at the time. However, it could be a recreation or a door moved from elsewhere in the house.
“We know the door is old,” says Mitchell. “We cannot emphatically say it is the original door.”
“The door itself has been there for a long time,” says Landmark Preservation co-founder Greg Jacobs, emphasizing the lack of other physical evidence. “There’s a possibility it is an early door. I would stop short of saying it’s the original door.”
The rest of the doorway was reconstructed with educated guesswork based on the limited and primitive drawings and photos available. “We didn’t have a blueprint, so we were able to create one,” says Jacobs.
A small amount of the panels in the casing above the door were crafted from historic wood salvaged from elsewhere in the house on the principle of keeping it in place. The rest was created from new wood in Landmark Preservation’s Savannah shop. The intent was to restore some of the impact of what Mitchell calls a “big-time door” intended for a three-story original.
“The door in no way personifies timid or demure behavior,” he says.
More technically, Jacobs says the idea was “bringing back more correct scale and presence and massing of that house.”
A bigger picture – or door – is the mansion’s crucial role in Atlanta’s historic preservation history. Dominant themes of history have changed since Margaret Mitchell’s “Lost Cause” era, but her vision of a history museum in the mansion open to all has come true. And a doorway into it is a crucial introduction in every way.
“Everything we do in that house by default then becomes unique,” says Jacobs. “So restoring windows in that house – that’s the oldest house in Atlanta you can restore windows in.”
The doorway is “something uniquely Atlanta, and it’s back,” says David Mitchell, emphasizing the project’s intent of leading by example. “We’re the Atlanta Preservation Center. We’re supposed to personify the tip of the spear here when it comes to preservation. How can we ask people to do it right if we don’t do it right?”
Part of the APC’s idea of doing it right is not attempting a full recreation of lost times. But rather highlighting what was lost when necessary. And major loss the preservationists did not intend to fill with artificial replacements were hand-painted decorative windows in the sidelights. But coincidence had another surprise in store, as a neighborhood couple noticed the work and showed up with one long-lost window painted with a leaf-like design.
The couple did not respond to a comment request, but in a letter to the APC, they described the rediscovery of the window by one of them. The man first noticed the window went missing around 1990, when he apparently was involved in some attempted contractor work at the mansion site. This year, he helped another neighbor move, for which she gave him a thank-you gift that turned out to be the missing window, apparently taken by her husband those years before.
“They just wanted to see it up when they walk their dogs,” said Mitchell of the couple’s return of the window. “… They asked for nothing whatsoever, which to me is the example of what a steward is.” The glass is now in its original place, particularly visible when backlit at night.
Theft from historic properties – and especially vacant and decaying ones – is a common problem. That goes double for something like the Grant Mansion, which had its profile raised by its association with the “Gone With the Wind” author. David Mitchell says he suspects there are many more pieces of the mansion in the basements and attics of people who sought “your little piece of Dixie.” While that could mean more pieces of history surprisingly saved, it’s also unlikely that descendants will know what they are. Without luck like that of the window given to history-minded neighbors, a landfill could be the ultimate fate of many such pieces, “so it’s lost not only once, but twice,” says Mitchell.
On the other hand, if you’ve got some piece of history to return to the Grant Mansion, you can expect thanks and a warm welcome. You’ll know which door to knock on.
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