Some of the oldest stories in South Downtown are written in wood. Cobb Landmarks, a metro Atlanta nonprofit, has joined with college students on a project that reads the growth rings in old building timber to work out when that wood was harvested for construction, and a group of the district's historic buildings is part of the study.
The science is called dendrochronology, the study of tree rings. For an old building, the age of its lumber offers a second opinion on its paperwork. Historical records may say a structure went up in a given year, while the wood that holds it together can point to a different answer.
Trevor Beemon, who leads Cobb Landmarks as executive director, described the effort to Axios as a way to bring scientific evidence to the history the organization presents to the public. Students from the University of West Georgia, working under two of their professors, are collecting between 12 and 15 samples from structures across the metro area.
The list reaches well beyond downtown. In Cobb County it includes the William Root House, the Power-Jackson Cabin and Brumby Hall, and Mimosa Hall in Roswell is also on it. The Root House, a Marietta museum run by Cobb Landmarks that interprets life in the middle of the 1800s, carries an official date of 1845. Beemon said one theory holds that part of it is older than that, which would place it among the oldest buildings in Marietta.
In South Downtown the timing matters. Bryan Capps Jr., the district's project manager, said samples will come from roughly 36 buildings that are going through structural rehabilitation and stabilization. He called the study essentially the single opportunity to learn about these buildings before redevelopment moves forward.
The rehab has already turned up surprises. Capps said the team has noticed that many of the buildings were pieced together over the decades with cosmetic patches, from walls that had gone missing to a long list of windows that someone had filled in with brick.
Capps also sees a bigger payoff for the city's sense of its own past. A common belief holds that Atlanta was burned to the ground during Gen. William T. Sherman's March to the Sea, and he said hard dates from old wood could challenge that idea. His hope is that the findings spark fresh interest in protecting what remains of Atlanta's oldest building stock.
For more on the group restoring these blocks, see how the new owners laid out their plan for South Downtown.
Original reporting by Kristal Dixon for Axios Atlanta.
