This Odd House
Atlanta Preservation Center to save one 
of the city's oldest, most storied houses
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Jim Auchmutey - Staff
Friday, December 28, 2001 

Jeanne Teasley was watching TV coverage of the terrorist attacks when a sheriff's cruiser pulled up outside her home in the Grant Park section of Atlanta.

A strange day --- Sept. 11 --- was about to get stranger.

Teasley, a 51-year-old seamstress, lives next to the Grant Mansion, a spooky shell of a structure that is one of Atlanta's few surviving antebellum homes. Its owner, nowhere to be seen, was being evicted, his possessions deposited on the sidewalk like so many bags of lawn clippings. Curious neighbors soon gathered to pick through the belongings: lamps, tables, a trunk that was almost too heavy to lift --- no wonder; it was full of pornography.

Late that afternoon, after the rummagers had drifted away, workers lugged out a huge, cloudy mirror that had hung over a vanished mantel. Teasley recognized the piece: Another owner, thinking it cursed, had draped it in black. The shroud was still there when mourners assembled in the house after his unexpected death.

Teasley saw a pickup truck stopping out front. A woman got out to inspect.

"That mirror is cursed," Teasley warned her.

The woman wrestled it into her truck anyway and drove off.

Sometimes it has seemed as if there was a curse on the Grant Mansion itself. Maybe now, like that mirror, the spell has departed.

This week begins a promising chapter in the long, eventful history of the 144-year-old house. The Atlanta Preservation Center, a nonprofit group devoted to saving the city's built environment, is purchasing the property, at 327 St. Paul Ave. S.E., with plans to restore and rebuild it for offices and a house museum.

The preservationists will have their hands full with this fixer-upper.

It's not so much a mansion as the memory of one. The upper floors have long since collapsed, leaving a facade of salmon-colored stucco that looks vaguely like the Alamo. Inside, a grandly restored hallway leads to a rebuilt space in the back. But on either side of the hall, the rooms are no longer there; thick brick walls enclose a ceiling of sky and a floor of raggedy pokeweed.

"It's rather evocative," says Boyd Coons, executive director of the Preservation Center, as he stands in a doorway and watches shadows play on the brick piles that were once fine Victorian fireplaces. "We might leave some of it this way so people can see the history for themselves."

The Grant house is one of only six still standing in the city of Atlanta that were built before the Civil War. None of the others embodies such a rich cross section of the past. This old house has seen author Margaret Mitchell, golfer Bobby Jones, the Grant of Grant Park. It has seen soldiers and drag queens, hermits and ghosts, fire and scandal, rot and renovation, the joy of birth, the misery of AIDS.

The house's story is Atlanta's. It begins with one of the city's most important early citizens.

The right Grant

First, let's get this straight: Grant Park was not named for Ulysses S. Grant. It was named for a Yankee, true, but not the one who commanded legions of bluecoats.

The namesake was Lemuel P. Grant, an engineer from Maine, who came to Georgia in 1840 to help build the railroads that were Atlanta's reason for being. He stayed and became a rail magnate, buying much of the virgin land southeast of town for as little as 75 cents an acre. In 1857, he crowned his holdings with an 8,250-square-foot Italianate mansion that had nine fireplaces, etched cranberry glass over the entry and a widow's walk on the roof.

After the Civil War broke out, Grant became a Confederate engineer (a colonel) and built miles of trenches and ramparts around Atlanta. Gen. William T. Sherman sidestepped the fortifications and captured the city by severing its rail connections. According to legend, the only reason his troops didn't burn the Grant house was that they found Masonic regalia inside. Sherman came from a family of Masons.

Grant helped Atlanta rebuild after the war, selling land for Grady Hospital and donating 100 acres for the establishment of Grant Park. He remained in the house until his wife died and he remarried and moved in 1881.

The mansion stayed in the family until the turn of the century, when it figured in another Atlanta legend. One of Grant's sons was sharing the quarters with a young couple, the Joneses. In 1902, the woman gave birth there to a sickly son who would grow up to become world famous: golf legend Robert Tyre Jones.

The porch done gone

The mansion changed hands seven times during the early 1900s and was about to sell again when another celebrated Atlantan entered the picture.

Margaret Mitchell knew from her research for "Gone With the Wind" how rare antebellum houses were in Atlanta. In 1941, a newspaperman named Boyd Taylor approached her about buying the Grant place so he could restore it. She lent him $3,750.

"It was about to be cut up into apartments," Mitchell explained. "I've seen that happen to so many old houses, and I couldn't stand to see this one go the same way. We haven't a thing like that in Atlanta to show tourists."

Some time later, Mitchell drove by the house and was horrified to see that Taylor had removed the original porches. She filed a lawsuit, accusing him of breaking his mortgage contract with her by stripping the property.

She won an injunction ordering him to stop any further work but lost the case in 1948. She died the next year after a car struck her on Peachtree Street.

Taylor resided in the house for another three decades but never forgot his benefactor. He told a reporter in 1979 that Mitchell's ghost visited him every spring, carrying jonquils from her grave in Oakland Cemetery. Considering their past disagreements, he made her sound rather benign: "Margaret just wanders through the house looking things over. She never talks."

If Mitchell had really seen what was going on, she might have shrieked. Over the years, as Taylor became an eccentric, white-bearded hermit, the mansion became a sad, scary place. Fires destroyed much of the roof, and the upper floors were in danger of collapse. German shepherds roamed the grounds behind a tall chain-link fence to ward off vandals. Taylor more or less camped out inside, with no power or plumbing, a loaded shotgun at his side.

"We always thought of that place as the neighborhood haunted house," says Mike Shelton, who grew up in Grant Park and renovates intown properties. "We knew not to go trick-or-treating there."

In 1981, Taylor was found dead in his bed. Police had to shoot a couple of his agitated German shepherds to reach the body.

Bashes to ashes

Things only got stranger on St. Paul Avenue after Taylor's demise.

One of his next-door neighbors was Dennis Walters, an historian and gun collector who worked at the Cyclorama. Walters had befriended Taylor, leaving him Christmas dinners and running an extension cord to the house in case he wanted some light. Walters told neighbors and journalists that he had bought the house from the estate and planned to return it to its antebellum glory.

He later backpedaled, admitting that he only "sort of" owned it and was taking care of it for the person who actually held title. At any rate, Walters soon gave up on saving the house when he became preoccupied with a reverse-discrimination lawsuit he had filed against the city. About that time, his wife discovered that he was having an affair with their adopted teenage daughter. Walters eventually married the girl and moved to Decatur. When she told him she was leaving him for another man, he shot her four times and then killed himself.

A more respectable custodian arrived in 1984. Robert J. O'Donoghue, a Denny's restaurant manager, bought the house for $29,000 and started making the first improvements in decades. He repaired much of the roof and had the mansion's first sewer line and bathroom installed. But work stopped when he was diagnosed with AIDS. Before he died in 1991, he had to sell off part of the back yard to pay for medication.

The property languished in probate for more than three years. In 1994, Woodrow Mankin, a well-known interior designer, bought the mansion for $30,000 and invited friends over for a candlelight "cleansing ritual" to exorcise the grounds.

Mankin had the decaying upper floors pushed down and built a sort of efficiency apartment within the ruins. He showed off his progress at fund-raiser tea parties and Halloween balls where he might dress in a white planter's suit or come in drag as the "black widow." Amused neighbors couldn't help but see him cavorting behind the 10-foot windows in his birthday suit.

It was Mankin who covered the mirror in black after a psychic advised him it was cursed. Soon afterward, he died suddenly at age 37 --- of heart failure, the obituary said. At a memorial service, mourners were asked to take a handful of his ashes and scatter them about the premises.

When he heard about the unconventional rites, the next buyer, real estate agent Garrith Xavier-Carey, warily approached Jeanne Teasley next door. "I'm superstitious," she remembers him saying. "They didn't put any ashes inside the house, did they?"

What would the colonel think?

Xavier-Carey didn't last long in the old house. Last summer, his lender foreclosed.

The mansion went on the market just as the Preservation Center was wondering whether it might have to move from its quarters in the Rose House, a 1901 relic across from Crawford Long Hospital in Midtown. The organization wanted to buy the building and restore it, but the owners were asking more than $1 million. The Grant house --- long one of the city's most endangered historic properties --- was a steal by comparison, at $109,900. The preservationists plan to raise another $625,000 to rebuild the structure and establish an endowment for its upkeep.

"We had other investors who wanted the house, but they would have torn it down," says the listing agent, Bob Hodge. "Hopefully, this house has found a home."

Shortly before Christmas, the Preservation Center held an open house for the neighborhood. While the place was being tidied up, someone found a stash of pornography in the bathroom. Coons, who carries himself in the proper manner of a Victorian gentleman, promptly evicted the offending material, as if he were afraid Col. Grant might see it.

"There are some things about this house," the director says, "that I don't want to know."

<< Back