Rhodes Hall: The Dream on Peachtree

The stone castle rising behind its iron gate along Peachtree Road is Rhodes Hall, built between nineteen oh two and nineteen oh four for Amos Giles Rhodes, the founder of Rhodes Furniture, once the largest furniture retail chain in the American South. Rhodes called his home Le Reve, French for The Dream, and the name suited both the architecture and the man who commissioned it.

Designed by Atlanta architect Willis F. Denny II, the mansion is built of rough-cut Stone Mountain granite in the Romanesque Revival style, an unusual choice in a city where wealthy Atlantans typically favored the white-columned Greek Revival vocabulary of the Old South. The interior is extraordinarily intact for a house of its age, retaining most of its original woodwork, plasterwork, and furnishings. But the most remarkable feature is a suite of hand-painted art glass windows lining the grand staircase hall, commissioned to depict the rise and fall of the Confederacy. Beginning with Jefferson Davis's inauguration and ending with the defeated Southern soldiers stacking arms, the windows form a sustained memorial to the Lost Cause mythology that defined white Southern identity in the early twentieth century, created just forty years after Appomattox.

Amos Rhodes died in nineteen twenty-eight, and his heirs later deeded the house to the State of Georgia to be used for historical purposes. Renamed Rhodes Memorial Hall, it served as the State Archives building for decades, holding Georgia's official records until the archives moved to a modern facility in nineteen sixty-five. The Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation has operated the building as its headquarters since nineteen eighty-three and has worked steadily to restore what remains one of the most intact Victorian interiors in Atlanta and one of the last surviving Peachtree Road mansions from the Gilded Age.