Bonar Hall
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Bonar Hall
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| Location | 962 Dixie Avenue Madison, Georgia 30650 |
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| Built | 1839 |
| Architectural style | Late Georgian |
| MPS | Madison Historic District |
| NRHP Reference # | 72000388 |
| Added to NRHP | January 20, 1972 |
Bonar Hall is an 1839-40 Georgian-style house in Madison, Georgia, one of the first of the grand-style homes built during the town's cotton-boom heyday, 1840-60. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.
The 2-story brick townhouse was built by John Byne Walker, an early Morgan county pioneer, and his heiress bride, Eliza Fannin, half-sister of a war hero, James W. Fannin, Jr., the famous commander at the Goliad Massacre during the Texas Revolution after whom counties in Georgia and Texas are named. Their home sat on a large tract of land that she inherited from her father, Isham Fannin, one of the founders of Madison and Morgan County, he being on the first board of county officials who were, in turn, responsible for founding the town.
The first bricks, made on John Byne's plantations, were laid on February 25, 1839, starting with the brick kitchen; all of the brickwork was finished by early July. They moved into their new home 10 months later. Designed by an unknown professional architect, the main house, known then as the John Byne Walker Townhouse, was originally a four-over-four traditional Georgian manor house with rooms 20’x 20’, eight fireplaces, 18"-thick walls, silver doorknobs and 13' ceilings. The Georgian-style house featured a small 1-story portico with four white columns, with small brick "summer houses" on either side (now a tea house and an orangery) and, in back, a 3-room brick kitchen flanked on either side by matching his and her brick “necessaries”. Today, the 13-acre (53,000 m2) estate includes, in addition, a two-room cabin originally from downtown Madison and one of the oldest buildings in the town (c. 1810-1815), a slave cabin (c. 1830), a tenant house (c. 1900), a classic 1880's Victorian carriage house, a 1920s log smoke house, and a working well. Of particular note is the classic formal boxwood garden dating from around 1850 and described in numerous books on historic gardens of the South.
A cotton-growing magnate, John Byne Walker was one of the wealthiest men in Morgan County at the time of the Civil War, owning over 200 slaves and some 4,000 acres (16 km2) in Morgan County, Georgia and 6,000 in Wharton County, Texas, to which he traveled yearly between 1846 and 1862. One of the original backers of the Georgia Railroad, he was the city's leading benefactor of the Baptist Church, donating among other things all the brick to the construction of the Madison First Baptist Church (1858). Walker brick were also used in the construction of the train depot (1840), the Presbyterian church (1842), and the Baptist College (1849), renamed the Georgia Female College.
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