Cobb Landmarks and Historical Society

Properties | Preservation Priorities

 

Preservation Priority List Alumnus

Bostwick-Fraser House
Atlanta-Frasier Street Historic District, Marietta

 

 

Sarah Gober Temple, author of The First Hundred Years, regarded the Bostwick-Fraser house as one of the two most historically interesting houses in Marietta, and it is one of two structures in Cobb County listed in the Historic American Buildings Survey. Margaret Mitchell, perhaps on Mrs. Temple’s recommendation, is said to have suggested it to David O. Selznick as a possible model for Tara. This simple square, wood frame house, with a two-story portico supported by the Doric columns to which so many Georgians aspired, is an excellent representative of the Greek Revival in upcountry Georgia. Although it didn’t make Gone with the Wind, it became the setting of Eugenia Price’s novel Beauty from Ashes, with its real-life wartime owner as heroine. The house was built about 1844 by Marietta merchant Charles Bostwick. In the early 1850s the house was purchased by Ann Couper Fraser, widow of Captain John Fraser, formerly of the British Royal Marines, and daughter of John Couper, owner of the famous Cannon’s Point Plantation on Saint Simon’s Island. One of Mrs. Fraser’s daughters, Fanny, was a nurse with the Confederate army and served also as a secret agent, supplying information about Federal troop movements and carrying dispatches. When Sherman’s army occupied Marietta in 1864, the lower floor and grounds of the Fraser house became a hospital for wounded soldiers, with the family confined to the upper floor. The house and remaining grounds were owned and lived in by descendants of Ann Fraser until it was sold to Mr. Wes Godwin, who developed the office and residential building next door.

 

 

Outcome:

 

The property was threatened as a result of its limited viability in its compromised setting. Protection of this property involved finding a viable long-term owner. In 2008, the Bostwick-Fraser House was purchased and renovated and will be used in the future as a law firm. Cobb Landmarks consulted with the new owners to provide guidance in the rehabilitation procedure.

 

 

Preservation Priorities

Acworth’s Rosenwald School Acworth’s Bethel AME Church Brushy Mountain Trenches Cheney-Newcomer House Hooper-Turner House

Nesbitt/Union Chapel Power-Jackson Cabin Tapp House Wallis House

"Graduates” of our List

• Bostwick-Fraser House
• Cowen Farmstead

 

 

• Root House
• Power Cabin
• Preservation Priorities