On Wednesday, Aug. 9, the Flannery O’Connor Andalusia Foundation Board gifted Flannery O’Connor’s Andalusia Farm to GC, which is now planned to be restored and reopened to the public with possible new additions to the property.
The foundation gifted the over 500-acre farm, the buildings and the possessions inside of the buildings to GC, Flannery O’Connor’s alma mater.
“Our plan with Andalusia will be to operate as a historic house museum and, of course the grounds and the site, to interpret it for the life of Flannery O’Connor probably in the late 1950s,” said Matt Davis, GC’s director of Andalusia. “The goal of that interpretation will be to showcase life on the farm, to talk about how that landscape influenced Flannery’s writing and how the dairy farm worked and how that influenced her life and works.”
GC plans to only restore the property and limit the construction of additional buildings on the site so that it will showcase life on the farm for O’Connor.
“[We plan to build] nothing more than a visitor’s center. Our job is to restore and interpret the historic environment there and to have that core area around the farm buildings as pristine as we can to take it back to the period Ms. O’Connor was there,” Davis said.
In addition to discussion of adding a visitor’s center, which will move the gift shop from the bottom floor of the house to a separate building, allowing them to restore the room previously used for the gift shop to how it would have looked when O’Connor lived there, there has also been talk of building cottages or creating some sort of writer’s colony on the property in the future.
The farm, which has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980, was in poor condition and in need of restoration, but lacked the funds to do so. The only source of income for the property was sales from the gift shop, tickets and donations made by visitors.
“The house really needed restoration on a major level. We had studies done with detailed recommendations and felt that we were never going to be able to actually restore the property to the condition it was when Flannery lived there and wrote her stories. One structure did collapse — the Nail House — and others were in major disrepair,” said Donna Barwick, a chair on the Flannery O’Connor Andalusia Foundation Board. “The board came to the conclusion that due to their lack of funds, the best way to restore the property would be to gift it to Georgia College.”
The board hopes that GC will be able to restore and reopen Andalusia and make it a bigger landmark than it already is. “While we would like to see the entire property remain intact and the larger 500 acres or so can be seen as important to her literature, the core areas around the house and other structures like that barn, Hill House, etc. are the most important to her literature and ‘sense of place’ that she is famous for,” Barwick said.
The addition of the property will allow for students to learn more about O’Connor and her works that have heavily influenced GC’s curriculum.
“I think that it gives Georgia College a great opportunity, especially for the English program here, to learn about a piece of history and about Flannery O’Connor,” said Katie Frierson, a second-year student at GC.
O’Connor was known best for her Southern Gothic Novel, “Wise Blood”, and many other short stories. She lived at Andalusia for the last 13 years of her life. The addition of Andalusia will accompany Georgia College’s other collection of historic properties that include The Governor’s Mansion and the Sallie Ellis Davis House.