The 1832 Georgia land lottery offered Cherokee lands in North Fulton and elsewhere to Georgia citizens. Two kinds of lottery drawings were held that year, one for 160-acre land lots and one for 40-acre gold lots. Gold lots were where it was thought gold might exist.
Gold lot 678, in today’s city of Milton, was drawn by William Flanders of Emanuel County. The state granted the property to him on May 10, 1839. Flanders probably flipped the property by selling it to another person whose name is not known because some of the early deed books are missing. The next known record of the lot was in a Milton County property tax digest of 1868. It showed that lot 678, along with lot 619, also 40 acres, was processed by Madison Jameson, administrator of the estate of Ambrose Phillips, deceased. The Phillips family owned the property from sometime before 1860 until 1932.
We know this thanks to the efforts of Austin Stephens, a researcher of historic properties who was engaged in 2015 by the owners of the property, Robert and Joan Rushton, to research its history.
The Rushton family purchased the property in December 1990 and extensively renovated the house and its outbuildings and yard. They kept detailed records of their renovations.
The original house was built prior to 1860 in the hall and parlor style which was popular in Colonial and post-Colonial periods. Hall and parlor houses were simple side-gabled structures, two rooms wide and one room deep with two front doors opening into the hall and parlor from a front porch. The house had oak log joists supporting the floor with some of the original bark remaining today. Wall and ceiling boards were planed by hand with boards of random width, some as wide as 23 inches.
One of the highlights of the house is a rare dining room ceiling painted in the 1850s by an itinerant German painter. He used…
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