res ipsa loquitur

The building at the top of the page, which is the building in the foreground of the bottom picture, is the building where the first classes met for what is now Columbia Theological Seminary. It is in Lexington, GA. Last Spring John Richardson and I drove from Decatur to check it out. There are some photos of this building in earlier days. One photo, on display in Campbell Hall at the Seminary, shows this building with a porch and wisteria. The porch was where the concrete steps with pipe hand-rail are now. The porch stretched across the front of the structure. The inside of this building has no original flooring. The current flooring is some kind of artificial board and plywood. I entered one room and my feet began sinking into the floor. The material was sodden and reacted to my weight as rubber might. I didn't stay on it long enough to see how far it could be stretched. The building has a top story but this story is inaccessible: the ladder/steps leading up to the top are in the room with the questionable flooring. This building is now being used as a Sunday School room/clubhouse of some sort. There is a kitchen. A massive stone fireplace remains in the middle of the structure and might be original to the building. As near as I can tell this building is beyond restoration - at least on the interior. It has suffered years of neglect and materials have been scavenged for other houses from it. I think that this is what happened to the porch.
John and I marveled at the building. We were glad to be able to walk inside and look around. At first we couldn't believe that this was the structure we were looking for. Even though there was a large sign on one side of the building, we had difficulty getting around how little it resembled the photo from earlier in the century. But as we walked around the neighborhood we had to conclude that this sad structure was indeed Columbia's first home.
Right next to it is a marvelous Presbyterian church. It has pointed windows and promised quite a wonderful old interior. We weren't able to get inside of this building, but a friend of mine, Cheryl Gosa, preached there as a student and told me that it is indeed old and quaint inside. Outside in the graveyard are the graves of early Georgia governors. Lexington was a busy place 170 years ago. Not so much now.