Atlanta's Burns Cottage Replica

In the early nineteen tens, the Burns Club of Atlanta erected something that exists nowhere else in the world: an exact replica of the thatched cottage near Kirk Alloway in Ayrshire, Scotland, where the poet Robert Burns was born on January twenty-fifth, seventeen fifty-nine. Burns wrote Auld Lang Syne, Scots Wha Hae, and To a Mouse, and became not only Scotland's national bard but one of the patron saints of Freemasonry worldwide. The Atlanta club built its replica as a meeting place and shrine to the poet. The original cottage in Scotland survives as a museum; Atlanta's version was a remarkable act of transatlantic devotion by Scottish immigrants and admirers who carried their cultural loyalties deep into the American South.