Capitol View Manor, Clark University and the Freedman's Aid Society

While researching a paper about the development of Stewart Avenue (Metropolitan Parkway), I discovered a 1911 Fulton County map in the Georgia Archives (map above, many, many thanks to the Georgia Archives for allowing me to post the image). The map showed that the bulk of the property on which Capitol View Manor sits was owned at that time by the Freedmans Aid Society (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedmen's_Aid_Society). I was intrigued!

On the 1911 Fulton County map, Capitol View Manor is on land lot 88 (the yellow map is Land Lot 88 from the Fulton County GIS). The west edge is Stewart Avenue, our northern border is the Atlantic and Western Railroad. The wiggly line you see running through the northeast corner is a creek that originates in the Pittsburgh Neighborhood. Chances are good that the creek still exists in some form and neighbors on Hillside may see some evidence of it.

According to The Clark College Legacy by James P. Brawley, the money to purchase 450 acres of land (including the parcels on which the CVM neighborhood sits) was raised by Bishop Gilbert Haven. According to George Prentice in his book, The Life of Gilbert Haven: Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Haven was quite a radical, having been first an Abolitionist and upon coming to Atlanta, an agitator for the rights and dignity of the African American people. The land deal was brokered through Reverend Richard S. Rust of the Freedman's Aid Society in 1872 and purchased from a Mr. James M. Ball (from the Freedman's Aid Society Records 1872-1932, Roll 116, Entry from November 7, 1872, Atlanta University Center Archives). Per Brawley the land was purchased to support an agricultural program of the college. This program would: Supply food for the college, provide work for the students, train students to be agricultural workers, and serve the farming community of Georgia and the regional south. The program was extremely successful and Brawley reports that at the 1908 Annual Roundup Farmer's Institute, Perry C. Parks reported, "the growing of huge crops of vegetables, thousands of pounds of pork, thousands of gallons of milk and hundreds of pounds of butter."

In 1924 350 acres of land, including that on which Capitol View Manor sits, was sold to endow the college. The property was sold for circa $235,000. In September of 1926, Turman-Brown Realtors began selling lots in the new Capitol View Manor Subdivision.

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Notes:

1911 Fulton County Map, produced by Hudgins Company, courtesy of the Georgia Archives