Oak Hill Berry Museum
| Oak Hill | |
Gate Entrance to Berry Museum.
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 34.280037, -85.181408
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| Established | 1884 (original farmhouse in 1847) |
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| Location | 24 Veterans Memorial Hwy Rome, Georgia, United States |
| Coordinates | 34°16′48″N 85°10′53″W / 34.280037°N 85.181408°W |
| Website | http://www.berry.edu/oakhill/ |
Oak Hill & The Martha Berry Museum is the home and museum about Berry College founder Martha Berry located in Rome, Georgia, United States. It is also an All-America Selections Display Garden, a part of Berry Schools on the National Register of Historic Places, and a AAA Star Attraction.
Oak Hill is a 170-acre (0.69 km2) estate Greek revival mansion. Oak Hill was an original Victorian-style farmhouse that was built in 1847. During the American Civil War and the capture of Rome during The Atlanta Campaign, the estate was used by the Union soldiers as a place to stay.Charles H. Smith, whose widely known pen name was Bill Arp, owned the estate before he sold it to his colleague Andrew M. Sloan. Thomas Berry and his family moved to Rome, Georgia from Alabama in 1868 to become a partner in Berrys and Company, a wholesale grocery and cotton brokerage business. Around 1871, his business became successful, and Thomas Berry decided to move to a better place so he purchased the estate from Sloan for $9,000. Thomas and his family: his wife Frances Margaret Rhea, his eight children, and his late brother James' three orphaned children moved into the farmhouse. In 1884, after the farmhouse caught fire and burned down, Thomas rebuilt and restored it as a Greek-style Revival home, named Oak Hill.
Thomas' will stated that he left his possessions, home, and 160-acre (0.65 km2) estate to his eight children to be sold, and for the money to be divided equally among his children after the deaths of his wife & himself. Martha Berry urgently desired to keep the house as her home, her schools, and symbol of her triumphs and tragedies. In October 1927, her family sold their shares of the Oak Hill estate to her, and she in turn deeded the estate to The Berry Schools, for five dollars.
Once Oak Hill Estate was transferred to The Berry Schools, Martha decided to make home improvements, and hired the Boston architectural firm Coolidge & Carlson, who had built the Ford Complex and an addition onto the chapel on the Berry College campus. In the course of 1927-1928 renovations, the interior of the house was stripped down to the studs and replaced with plaster walls. A decorative element in the hallway was a long case clock, a reproduction of an eighteenth-century colonial-style piece made by Berry Schools industrial arts teacher Frank Gottshall. Electricity and indoor plumbing were added as part of the renovation. Six and half bathrooms were installed to replace the outhouse located behind the house, as well as steam heating, as the house was "almost impossible to heat with open fireplaces". Included in the renovation were the "new" parlor, kitchen, pantry, library, 1930s elevator, two bedrooms, portico on the rear of the house, and large addition to the back of the house beyond the two columns at the end of the hallway.
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