The Hay House, Macon
Near Macon, Georgia
In the middle of Macon, on Georgia Avenue, there is an eighteen-thousand-square-foot Italian Renaissance palazzo that was finished in eighteen fifty-nine. They called it the Palace of the South, and standing in front of it today it is not hard to see why.
The man who built it was William Butler Johnston, a Macon banker who would later serve as keeper of the Confederate treasury. In the early eighteen fifties Johnston and his new wife Anne Tracy spent three years on an extended European honeymoon, moving through France, Italy, and Great Britain. When they came back to Georgia they wanted to bring Europe with them. They commissioned the Philadelphia firm of T. Thomas and Son to design a house modeled on the palaces of Florence and Rome. It was a conscious rejection of the Greek Revival style that dominated antebellum Southern architecture. The Johnston house was going to be different.
Construction took four years. The result was a four-story mansion topped by a two-story cupola, with hot and cold running water, gas lighting, and central heat, amenities so far ahead of their time in Georgia that visitors could scarcely believe them. The interior featured hand-painted ceilings and elaborate plasterwork, and the cupola offered a view that let Johnston survey much of the city he had helped finance.
Johnston died before the Confederacy did. His daughter Mary Ellen and her husband Judge William H. Felton occupied the house for decades after. In nineteen twenty-five the property passed to P. L. Hay, whose family eventually donated it to the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation in nineteen seventy-seven when the maintenance costs became impossible to meet alone. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-four, three years before the transfer was complete.
The house still stands on the edge of Macon's historic district, an improbable piece of Tuscany transplanted into the Georgia clay, built by a man who was about to help finance a war to preserve a world that would not survive it.
