Historic homes within the Williams Park neighborhood

A series of articles by Casey Clavin and Victor Koch.

Shortly after relocating to Smyrna from Boston in 2011, historian and educator Bill Marchione created a monthly lecture series with speakers covering a wide variety of local history-related subjects. Seeing my notice in the Williams Park Neighbors’ newsletter about the 1889 Lyle-Bowles house in jeopardy of demolition, he phoned first to discuss historic preservation and later asked if I might prepare a lecture on our neighborhood’s historic structures. I hesitated — while I’ve always had a fondness for old houses, a historian I am not. Then my husband Vic Koch opted in and we embarked on this as a joint project.

We began by building a list of the oldest houses and interviewing the current owners. Three were still in the hands of original families' descendants who generously provided old photos and documents. We photographed the structures, then hit the books. Learning chronology and characteristics of house types was fairly straight forward but information on these particular houses was hard to come by. Cobb tax records, which would have detailed buildings present in each tax year, had been culled decades ago. Deed research rarely provides more than a chain of land ownership, but occasionally reveals clues regarding buildings extant and/or personal motivations at the time of transaction. 

As histories of the houses led to stories of their successive occupants, we learned that Marietta Daily Journal kept a regular section on Smyrna-related news in the early 20th century and that old phone directories at Marietta Library specified residents’ occupations. We read Past, Present, Future (autobiography/history of Smyrna) by Williams Park native Mazie Whitfield Nelson and The Paper Boy by Smyrna native Pete Wood. We found a profile of one Williams Park family in a Smyrna centennial publication, then contradictory information regarding its patriarch’s role in Smyrna's 1938 race riots from the book Let Justice Be Done. The many twists and turns following the 1913 murder of 13 year old Mary Phagen, whose aunt and uncle lived in WP, punctuated the news all the way through the 1986 pardon /exoneration of the man wrongly lynched for the crime.

Our research in 2012 found twenty houses still standing in Williams Park which had been built before the First World War. They constituted the greatest concentration of surviving older buildings in all of Smyrna. In 2013 the 1889 Lyle-Bowles House was lost to demolition and as I write this, the 1906 Bell House is slated for the same fate. 

I’m grateful to Bill Marchione for encouraging this research — the project itself was enjoyable and the response to the lectures, the walking tour, and the articles (originally published 2013 - 2018) has been gratifying. For more local history I strongly recommend both his book A Brief History of Smyrna, Georgia and his website Local Historian North & South.

Casey Clavin