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Atlanta History Center
The Atlanta History Center is in
the Buckhead district of Atlanta, Georgia and has become one of the
most prominent history museums in the nation. There are historical
homes and gardens that also can be found here, which is why it is
called a center and not museum; it is more. The Kenan Research
Center contains 3.5 million resources and a perfect reproduction of
historian Franklin Garrett's office; who was 94 when he passed on in
2000. It also houses one of the most significant and biggest
collections of civil war relics in the world, and the Swan house and
Tullie Smith farm have been relocated to the center's grounds. The
center manages three types of exhibits; permanent, temporary and
traveling, with 6 permanent exhibits here. These include; the
Centennial Olympic Museum which is composed of two areas; the upper
Sports Lab, which you take an elevator to get to, and has equipment
that lets you test yourself against the Olympic records; and a main
area containing the artifacts, films, information and interactives.
One of the major attractions includes a 12 part test, on your
knowledge of the Olympics and afterwards posts your score; the
Turning Point: the American Civil War exhibition that contains 1400
of the city's history center's huge collection of Civil War relics;
the Metropolitan Frontiers display chronicles the city's expansion
from farm to city in 4 stages; the Shaping Traditions: Folk Arts in
a Changing South, which showcases the developments and attributes of
the south's folk art; the Down the Fairway with Bobby Jones exhibit
that tells of the state's most famous golfer and the Phillip
Trammell Shutze: Atlanta Classicist, connoisseur and collector.
The current temporary exhibits include; the Ink to Paper exhibit
that details the methods to bring print to pictures; and the
Courage: the Vision to End Segregation, the Guts to Fight for It
unfolds the truth behind the Brown vs. Board of Education case that
desegregated schools in this nation. The Tullie Smith House is an
antebellum farmhouse that was constructed by the Robert Smith family
and has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
This fine old structure was part of a farm in Dekalb County that had
11 slaves and sat on 200 gorgeous acres. The entirety was moved to
the Atlanta History Center in 1969, with farm house, numerous
gardens, smokehouse, kitchen, barn, blacksmith shop, double corncrib
and log cabin. The barn even has animals that you would find on a
farm inside for the enjoyment of the children that come here to
visit. The Victorian and Lee playhouses are really miniatures, and
the Swan house was designed by Phillip Trammell Shutze in the 1920s,
named thus because of its many swan designs and surrounded by the
Boxwood Garden, that was copied from Italian gardens the way they
looked in the 18th century England. The front landscape, two
cloverleaf fountains and terraced lawn just happens to be one of the
most photographed sights in the country. The center owns the
renovated Margaret Mitchell House and Museum; where Margaret lived
from 1925 until 1932 when she wrote Gone With the Wind. The home
includes the movie museum, the reconstructed apartment #1 where she
lived, changing displays and the literary center.
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