The House That Honeymoon Built

In eighteen fifty-two, a Macon banker named William Butler Johnston took his new wife Anne on a honeymoon to Europe that lasted three years. They visited hundreds of museums, galleries, historic sites, and art studios across England, France, Italy, and beyond. They took notes. They collected. They had opinions about architecture. When they returned to Macon in eighteen fifty-five, they set about building a house.

What rose over the next four years at the corner of Georgia Avenue was unlike anything else in Georgia. The Johnston-Felton-Hay House is eighteen thousand square feet, twenty-four rooms, built in Italian Renaissance Revival style by a New York architectural firm called T. Thomas and Son, with the actual construction supervised by a local master builder who brought Italian craftsmen to Macon specifically for the project. The ceiling frescos and carved woodwork required skills that did not exist in Georgia at the time.

The house came equipped with amenities its neighbors could not have imagined: hot and cold running water, central heating, a speaker-tube system connecting fifteen rooms, and what the family called a French lift, an early version of an elevator, inside a private residence. The ventilation system drew fresh air through subfloor channels and exhausted heat through the cupola that crowned the roof three stories up.

Johnston derived his wealth not from cotton and enslaved labor in the traditional plantation sense, but from banking, railroads, and utilities. He was a new kind of Southern capitalist, which may explain why he built a house that looked less like a plantation manor and more like a Florentine palazzo. The Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation now operates it as a museum. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-four.