Northeast Georgia History Center
During the 1970s, James and Francis Mathis started collecting artifacts from the early days of those who settled in Northeast Georgia. A number of items were soon displayed at Gainesville’s Home Federal Savings Bank. As others in the community started to express an interest in remembering the past, a nucleus began to be formed with plans to start a museum.
The City of Gainesville made available to the group a vacant fire station building downtown. Volunteers then began collecting objects that would relate to the history of this area. The Georgia Mountain History Museum was underway. School children, tourists, and home-folks were soon attracted to the museum.
By the early 1990s, it was realized that the future of the museum had to include its own building in a more accessible location. The turning point came in 1995 when Brenau University President John Burd committed a tract of campus property for the History Museum, the White Path Cabin, and a blacksmith shop donated by Hoyt Herrin. Volunteers started soliciting the community for contributions and, after some years of stop and go, architectural plans were finally completed and all stood in readiness for its grand opening, held in May 2004.
Read more about this topic: Brenau University
Famous quotes containing the words georgia, history and/or center:
“I am perhaps being a bit facetious but if some of my good Baptist brethren in Georgia had done a little preaching from the pulpit against the K.K.K. in the ‘20s, I would have a little more genuine American respect for their Christianity!”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set in. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“New York is what Paris was in the twenties ... the center of the art world. And we want to be in the center. It’s the greatest place on earth.... I’ve got a lot of friends here and I even brought my own cash.”
—John Lennon (1940–1980)