Bryan House

Ever wondered about the history behind an old house? The Bryan House is being restored, and its unique history is being shared through a series of short stories and restoration photos. It’s a fresh approach to bringing the past to life. Check out the journey and see what makes this project special!

Hollywood Meets History 

In Houston County, Georgia, where the past lingers like ivy on the heart of the land, the Bryan House stands, a weathered emblem of a South both radiant and shadowed. Built in 1832 as a frontier home, its dogtrot frame cradled Nancy Bryan, born in 1834, a daughter of a growing clan. The Bryan family’s world rested on the labor of some fifty enslaved souls across 1,200 acres, their names faded in ledgers but etched into the earth’s memory. The house, simple yet steadfast, bore witness to lives caught in a world teetering between promise and peril, its walls humming with unspoken stories.

In the spring of 1855, when dogwoods bloomed like drifts of snow across the Georgia hills, Nancy, twenty-one, wed Mayberry Whitehurst. His Gordon plantation, fifty miles off near Griswoldville, sprawled wide, a kingdom of cotton and hope beneath a sky that seemed to vow eternity. By 1864, when war’s dark tide swept over the land, Nancy was no longer the hopeful bride but a mother, her heart bound to four-year-old Thulia, whose laughter echoed through Gordon’s shadowed halls. Yet war spared no tenderness. Sherman’s soldiers descended, their blue ranks a scourge upon the fields. Tents sprouted like thorns across the plantation, and its proud house, once alive with warmth, became a hollowed shell, its rooms seized by Union officers for a fleeting command post. When they marched on, they left ruin—fields charred, dreams reduced to ash, the soul of Gordon torn asunder.

Yet across the churning Ocmulgee River, the Bryan House stood untouched, a quiet haven spared by the river’s embrace. Its currents guarded the home like a sacred vow, too formidable for Sherman’s men to ford in their haste toward Savannah. Unlike fictional grand Tara, the Bryan House held a truer South—unadorned, resolute, its spirit rooted deep in the land. That legacy, like a breeze carrying seed, stretched far beyond Houston County through Susan Myrick, Thulia’s daughter and Nancy’s granddaughter.  Susan, bearing the scars of a South ravaged by war, became its fierce keeper as the “Emily Post of the South.” On the set of Gone with the Wind, she shaped Clark Gable’s drawl to carry Georgia’s cadence, her pride unyielding. In her 1939 diary, she called Gable “dynamic, quiet, polite, human, and fairly bursting with IT”—words that captured not just a man but the South’s defiant spirit. Susan wove her grandmother’s endurance, her mother’s grace, and the memory of those unnamed souls into a story that reached beyond the Ocmulgee, beyond Gordon’s ashes, to a world that would never forget the South she carried in her blood.

Rediscovered in 2020, the Bryan House stirs through restoration, its story revived by old photographs, whispered tales, and voices reborn through modern alchemy. A surviving planter’s home, it holds the ghosts of enslaved lives and a Bryan family whose dreams scattered like a civilization gone with the wind. Walk its halls, where history and Hollywood entwine, a monument and mirror to a South that was, is, and ever will be.

*Susan Myrick of Gone With The Wind: An Autobiographical Biography, by Susan Lindsley