Unreconciled History
Not everyone loves history or old houses. But hold a real artifact—feel the past speak—and you'll know the pull of a place like this.
The Bryan Dogtrot, and its history, is being brought back to life. It was built in Georgia on former Muscogee (Creek) land as a pioneer home. A “dogtrot,” by the way, is usually a log cabin with an open center hallway; this house just happens to have finer features, including plastered parlors and wainscoted walls. James and Catherine Bryan raised ten children here and held roughly fifty African Americans in slavery. Many of the Bryans’ sons and stepsons later fought in the Civil War; some lie in the family cemetery just steps from the porch.
Travel back in time as you discover it through restoration photos, stories, and the quiet details: hand-hewn beams, a breezeway worn smooth by generations, and gravestones of family and Confederate soldiers.
No commentary. No politics. Just a house, built before the Trail of Tears, worked by enslaved hands, caught in the crossfire of a civil war. Nearly two hundred years later, it still stands. “If these walls could talk” is something often heard; listen to what they have to say.
ca. 1870 dogtrot open hallway
Hollywood Meets History
Shaped in Margaret Mitchell's voice
(Some stories are written as facts, while others are shaped in the voices of famous Southern authors.)
The past lingers like ivy on the heart of the land, the Bryan Dogtrot stands as a weathered emblem of a South both radiant and shadowed. Its dogtrot frame cradled Nancy Bryan, born in 1834, a daughter of the growing clan. The Bryan family’s world rested on the labor of 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 the echoes of antebellum days.
In the spring of 1855, when dogwoods bloomed like bursts of snow in the Georgia forests, 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, Nancy's childhood home stood untouched, a quiet haven spared by the river’s embrace. Its currents guarded the house like a sacred vow, too formidable for Sherman’s men to ford in their haste toward Savannah. Unlike fictional grand Tara, the Bryan Dogtrot 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. A South that was, is, and ever will be.
Clark Gable and Susan Myrick on set*
*Susan Myrick of Gone With The Wind: An Autobiographical Biography, by Susan Lindsley