Submitted by Sammy Smith ([email protected])

Chattahoochee Park Pavilion, Gainesville. Photo from the Georgia Trust website here. Image by Halston Pitman.

What places in Georgia with importance value are most under threat right now?

In late October 2012, the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation released its list of 2012 Places in Peril. This year all are standing structures, and four have white (or nearly white) columns.

This year’s ten Places in Peril are Rutherford Hall on the University of Georgia campus, Athens; Orange Hall in St. Marys; W.W. Law House in Savannah; historic railroad buildings of Atlanta; Historic Liberty Street in Milledgeville; Randolph County Courthouse in Cuthbert; Mt. Zion Church in Sparta; Crown Mill Store in Dalton; Secondary Industrial High School in Columbus; and, Chattahoochee Park Pavilion in Gainesville.

In their notification email, the Georgia Trust noted that it uses its Places in Peril list to:

…raise awareness about Georgia’s significant historic, archaeological and cultural resources, including buildings, structures, districts, archaeological sites and cultural landscapes that are threatened by demolition, neglect, lack of maintenance, inappropriate development or insensitive public policy.

One of the 2012 Places in Peril is the Chattahoochee Park Pavilion, shown above. The Georgia Trust website says that it was built in an amusement park at the turn of the twentieth century, and bought by Georgia Power in 1923. They used it as an employee retreat until 1955. The Pavilion is the only one of the buildings from the amusement park to survive flooding by Lake Lanier. It is a wood frame structure with a complex system of roof trusses that is now owned by American Legion Post 7 of Gainesville.

The University of Georgia has moved forward this fall with plans to demolish Rutherford Hall, so it remains to be seen if its listing on the 2012 Places in Peril will save it from demolition. This website posted a story by Inger Wood about a meeting organized by UGA’s Student Historic Preservation Organization on September 6th to help save Rutherford Hall.

Posted online on Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

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