Tuesday, March 30, 2004
I'm just starting to do some research on the house me & my lady live in. It's in an Atlanta neighborhood called Grant Park - many of the homes built in the late 1800's. Our house is actually in more of a transitional area between Grant Park & another neighborhood called Cabbagetown. The house was listed as being built in 1920, but one thing we noticed was that the house doesn't match any of the other homes on the block. Most of the houses are rowhouses, most built for the nearby mill in Cabbagetown - but our house looks more like a typical southern farm house.
Thanks to Georgia State University's Pullen Library I found a variety of information regarding our home available online. First off here is a clipped image of the area we live in from a bird's eye view portrait of Atlanta from 1892:
Not much development at this point, but our street had been laid & there are a few houses around. Next is a Sanborn fire insuarance map from 1911. 19 years later our neighborhood has mostly filled in and includes our house - 9 years before it was supposedly built. It also shows different addresses from the present date.
From that address I did a search and found a genealogical page for a Civil War veteran born in 1832 that had moved from his Dekalb County farm to our address. We're not certain when he moved but he was living there based on the 1910 & 1920 census. That push's our house to sometime before 1910 & also opens up a possiblity that he had a small farm before the row houses were built. We have noticed that there are several pecan trees in our neighborhood - maybe he had a small orchard?
Another interesting image is from a 1949 aerial flyover of the City of Atlanta for the planning department.
This would most likely be the last view of a unified Grant Park, before I-20 plowed through the neighborhood in 1960. We've spoken with a few of our neighbors who have lived in the area all their life - one man talked about going to school nearby - where the freeway is. Lastly, here is a map of the 1949 aerial image georeferenced with present day streets:
You can see I-20 took up a block wide swath. Sometime we'll visit the Atlanta History Center to do some research but I'm pretty satisfied knowing at least this much of our home.
Thanks to Georgia State University's Pullen Library I found a variety of information regarding our home available online. First off here is a clipped image of the area we live in from a bird's eye view portrait of Atlanta from 1892:
Not much development at this point, but our street had been laid & there are a few houses around. Next is a Sanborn fire insuarance map from 1911. 19 years later our neighborhood has mostly filled in and includes our house - 9 years before it was supposedly built. It also shows different addresses from the present date.
From that address I did a search and found a genealogical page for a Civil War veteran born in 1832 that had moved from his Dekalb County farm to our address. We're not certain when he moved but he was living there based on the 1910 & 1920 census. That push's our house to sometime before 1910 & also opens up a possiblity that he had a small farm before the row houses were built. We have noticed that there are several pecan trees in our neighborhood - maybe he had a small orchard?
Another interesting image is from a 1949 aerial flyover of the City of Atlanta for the planning department.
This would most likely be the last view of a unified Grant Park, before I-20 plowed through the neighborhood in 1960. We've spoken with a few of our neighbors who have lived in the area all their life - one man talked about going to school nearby - where the freeway is. Lastly, here is a map of the 1949 aerial image georeferenced with present day streets:
You can see I-20 took up a block wide swath. Sometime we'll visit the Atlanta History Center to do some research but I'm pretty satisfied knowing at least this much of our home.
