"One Space, Many Stories" is a tour created by UWG's Center for Public History. Here, you will learn about many experiences of people who lived in this region to show what history hides behind the campus and beneath the surface of this land.

Welcome to the "One Space, Many Stories" Tour!

While you are currently at the University of West Georgia, this land has seen a lot of history, and many people have walked through this place with different experiences. To start off, where you are now is the ancestral land of the Muscogee (Creek) nation. Indigenous communities lived on this land for centuries prior to European settlement. Starting in the 1500s, European people started moving into Muscogee (Creek) land and trading, and eventually the United States established itself in the area. This land and its inhabitants saw a variety of responses from the Muscogee (Creek), from armed resistance to attempts at assimilation into American white society. By 1825, white Americans desired more access to this land for farming, mining, and other uses. William McIntosh of the Lower Creek tribe and other Creek leaders signed the Treaty of Indian Springs (1825), ceding Muscogee (Creek) land in Georgia and Alabama, in exchange for land in what was called “Indian Territory,” now present-day Oklahoma. However, this violated a Muscogee (Creek) law that stated that no lands could be sold without the approval of the Muscogee (Creek) council under the threat of death, so McIntosh was executed as a result. Regardless of the treaty, though, in 1830, President Andrew Jackson approved the Indian Removal Act, so Muscogee (Creek) people were forced to move to Indian Territory, during which many Muscogee (Creek) died and others experienced “tragedy and trauma” ("Video 3"). Despite such tragedies, the Muscogee (Creek) nation exists today as an active sovereign nation and its members even returned to their ancestral homelands near northwest Georgia in 2014 for a commemorative event.After the state of Georgia took native land and expelled indigenous people, it divided the land out to white settlers through land lotteries. Lots 99 and 100, which today make up most of the campus of UWG, were part of this Land Lottery. A white man named Thomas Bonner acquired the land in 1840 and established a farm here around 1843. The Bonners enslaved over 20 Black individuals to work the farm. Compared to a single cash crop-based plantation, the Bonner farm was a relatively small, country farm where the enslaved people who worked here raised livestock, grew cotton and other crops, and ran a distillery. One of the men who lived and worked on the Bonner farm was named Abraham Bonner, who spoke about his experiences after being enslaved on the Bonner farm, and from whom we know a lot of what we do about the Bonner farm today.Recently, archaeologists identified a cemetery to the west of present-day Melson Hall, though evidence of a cemetery for the enslaved was also found in the early 1900s. The cemetery is believed to be a burial site of enslaved people from the Bonner Farm, which would have been located in the back of the main cemetery and would have contained rocks to designate graves. Though we might not know much about who these people were and what their lives were like living and working here, UWG is now working on interpreting the site and creating a memorial, and during this process, the University History Project at the Center for Public History hopes to consult with members of the community and family members descended from enslaved people who lived here.

Built around 1843, the Bonner House is a Greek Revival house that was originally owned by Thomas Bonner and his family. Bonner enslaved around 20 Black individuals, who worked on the farm, growing crops such as wheat, cotton, oats, potatoes, beans, and corn. There would have also been a distillery, a smokehouse, a commissary, slave quarters, and a cemetery on the property, none of which still stand. The Bonner family lived at this house until they sold it in 1865 after the Civil War and moved to Alabama. The house is now located on the property of and is owned by the State of Georgia's Board of Regents.

Bonner House

A Walking Tour of the Historic Front Campus at the University of West Georgia

This area remained extremely rural even into the turn of the century. Imagine this area as farmland with almost no buildings. Across from the present-day front campus buildings in front of Mandeville Hall, the Bonner House would have originally sat as well as other outbuildings, like the distillery, a smokehouse, commissary, and slave quarters. The Bonner House was relocated three hundred yards west from its original site circa 1915. By then the enslaved peoples’ quarters and cemetery would not have been visible, though archeological evidence shows that the cemetery would have probably been located to the west of today's Melson Hall. While the University of West Georgia says it was established in 1906, it was not initially called the University of West Georgia. At first, the Fourth District Agricultural and Mechanical School was located here. Present-day Cobb Hall is located where the President’s House, which was built in 1912, used to be. It stood in between the girls’ dormitory (in the Bonner House) and the boys’ dormitory (in Melson Hall), perhaps to keep some folks from visiting after hours...Why did the A&amp;M School open in the early 1900s? Well, the South faced several social problems at the turn of the twentieth century. One of them was the flood of young workers into growing cities and out of agricultural areas. Many folks were concerned about the loss of skill, leadership, and labor left in agriculture. Therefore around this time, the number of public institutions of higher education that trained workers increased to support key industries, like agriculture, mining, and manufacturing. In 1906, Georgia’s Perry Act created agricultural and mechanical schools in the state. The previous Bonner Farm was chosen for an A&amp;M school, given that farming was a large part of the educational curriculum. The A&amp;M School in Carrollton was established in 1906 under the guidance of Principal John Holland Melson (the namesake for Melson Hall) and President Irvine S. Ingram (the namesake for Ingram Library). The first school bulletin asserted that, “It will be the aim of the school to make good farmers, good citizens, and good housekeepers.”When the school opened two years later, there were a few buildings at the site:<ol><li>the Bonner House (Dormitory)</li><li>Melson Hall (Dormitory)</li><li>Academic (Administration) Building, which was torn down in the 1970s</li><li>Adamson Hall (the West Dormitory)</li><li>President’s Bungalow, or House, which was moved in 1962 and now serves as the Honors College House near the west entrance of campus</li><li>Barn, which has since been torn down</li></ol>In January of 1908, the school opened with less than 200 students. Many students were rural youths seeking opportunities away from the family farm, like many students today who go to college for new experiences. However, what was less fun was that when school first started, the school had no central heat, no electric lights, and no desks in the classrooms, so students and teachers used “tables chairs, and kerosene lamps.” The classes for the students were split by socially constructed gender roles. Young men took courses centering around agriculture, like fertilizers, field crops, and livestock. Female students’ classes focused on the home, including cooking and sewing. The first social activity that students were involved with was hazing the freshman students during an event called Rat Week. The students were called “Fresh meat” with the implication that they needed “salting down.” According to students’ recollections, though, social life was relatively limited, except for nights called “socials,” where games were allowed but dancing was not. Broken rules would lead to punishments, one of which was boys digging up stumps on campus, which was actually one of the ways that the enslaved cemetery graves were uncovered by the school community.Even in its early years, the A&amp;M School was strongly connected to the surrounding community. Starting in 1909, the first Fourth District A&amp;M Fair was held towards the back of campus. At the fair, visitors could watch events like chasing a greased pig, three-legged races, and what was called “an Old Plantation Show.” In addition, football provided an opportunity for the community and A&amp;M School to come together.So, in addition to helping build up the region’s agricultural workforce, the A&amp;M School aimed to train what they thought were good housewives and to provide a space for community gatherings over time. However, not all community members were invited, given that the school was established only for white students. Additionally, it is difficult to know how all students and community members felt about events such as the Rat Week hazing and the “Old Plantation Show.” This history shows that different folks would probably have related to the A&amp;M School in different ways over its lifetime from 1906 to 1933.

Melson Hall was constructed in 1907 for the Fourth District A&M School in Carrollton, Georgia. Originally, it was built as a dormitory to house white male students at the A&M School. Named for A&M School principal John Holland Melson, Melson Hall now houses the Psychology Program at the University of West Georgia. Melson Hall also sits atop of what is believed to be a cemetery where the bodies of deceased enslaved laborers on the Bonner plantation property were buried in the mid-1800s.

Melson Hall

We are now at Martha Munro Hall, which currently houses the Theater Program. Originally built in 1938, the building was named after Martha Munro, the wife of President Irvine S. Ingram and a prominent figure on campus. Back to our story: the A&amp;M School ceased to exist in 1933. That year, the state selected Carrollton’s A&amp;M School to become West Georgia College, a two-year junior college. New buildings were added to the campus with the addition of Sanford Library, Mandeville (a girls’ dormitory), the Rural Arts building (Martha Munro), and the Auditorium (now called the Old Auditorium). Other social issues were present in the South in the early 1900s, besides those we discussed earlier. The South also faced inadequate schools in rural communities. The South’s school systems struggled in part due to the policies of the Jim Crow system, which required white and Black students to attend different schools. Therefore, already impoverished Southern states had to support two school systems, which exacerbated the education gap between the northern and southern states. What little funding the Southern states put into schools mostly went to white schools. Also, rural schools were much poorer quality than urban schools, and rural teachers were often less trained than urban teachers. Rural local schools often only had one, poorly-trained teacher teaching 6 to 8 different grades in different subjects in a “dilapidated” and poorly insulated school room. African American teachers and students worked in unequal segregated schools, with even fewer supplies and usually more crowded conditions. African American teachers were paid less than half of white teachers.This sounds like an overwhelming problem, right? One philanthropic organization in the North attempted to help address this nearly insurmountable issue. The Julius Rosenwald Fund was located in Chicago, Illinois but funded school building programs across the South. The Rosenwald Fund supported the construction of more than 200 schools across Georgia alone. Also, with money from the Rosenwald Fund, West Georgia College, in 1937, started a decade-long rural education program to train local schoolteachers. This program would have likely been located in the Rural Arts building, right here. The new program included rural arts survey courses, an exchange program between the College and teachers in the county, and a supervisory system in cooperation with white and Black schools in Carroll County. The College employed both a white and Black supervisor for the white and Black schools. Dannetta Sanders was a Black woman who supervised the “Negro schools” under W.G.C.’s rural education program and was listed as a member of the university’s faculty in a college bulletin, which was unusual considering Georgia’s strict Jim Crow laws.The Rosenwald-funded rural teacher training initiative aimed to better rural communities through educating teachers, in order to help them better address the challenges they faced in their communities. The Fourth District A&amp;M School did train teachers in what were called “normal schools” as early as 1923. However, this Rosenwald Fund supported effort eventually led to the expansion of teacher education programs and departments at W.G.C. and other Georgia universities, which started a tradition of teacher training lasting to today.

Originally built in 1938 as the Rural Arts Building, Martha Munro Hall was named in 1956 for Martha Munro, the wife of President Irvine S. Ingram. She was heavily involved in the school here, notably through her dedicated gardening on campus. This edifice was initially named the Rural Arts Building and housed departments such as the Rural Arts (i.e. home economics, rural life survey classes) and the administration of the Rosenwald Fund rural teacher training program, at West Georgia College. Today, Martha Munro houses the Theater Program at the University of West Georgia.


Martha Munro Hall

To continue our story: as a school connected to its community, West Georgia College was also affected by the start of World War II. The Army and the Navy designated West Georgia College as an accredited school for the training of young men for the military in northwest Georgia. Therefore, the College changed its curriculum to accommodate the physical education, mathematics, and other requirements of the military. The College’s pupils picked cotton for local farmers, collected scrap metal, wore U.S. colors, and participated in radio forums and speeches to keep the campus community updated on the war effort. However, not all students felt patriotic about the war effort, such as one who was quoted in the school’s newspaper, called The West Georgian, saying, “We are aware of this fact: there is a war in Europe and that is as far as most students’ interest goes. Sure people are being killed every day but many people are killed by automobiles in America and we don’t have to hear, see, and read of our butchery every minute of the day.” World War II made a lasting impact on the College. President Ingram worked to update the Education curriculum with the collaboration of student and faculty input, in order to prepare white students to help their community and their country. Additionally, students founded a couple of new organizations on campus. One was the Democratic Youth Society in 1944 to sponsor speakers and discuss political affairs, and another was the Veterans Club, organized in 1946 to provide support and community to returning veterans. The world and W.G.C. continued to change after World War II. In the 1950s with the rise of the Soviet Union in present-day Russia, many people in the U.S. experienced a widespread paranoia of communism and internal threats to American democracy, now known as the “Red Scare.” This phenomenon touched West Georgia College, as well. In 1954, Rebecca Lee, editor of The West Georgian wrote that dishonesty, which she claimed was inherent in Communism, was a great threat to democracy in the U.S. She called on her fellow students to fight subversion by avoiding being dishonest. In other articles, Lee expressed patriotic sentiments that readers were lucky to live in a country where they are “free.”Another change in the United States in the 1950s was an increase in funding for science and technology. Ever heard of the Space Race? Space travel was one of the areas that the U.S. invested in. Another change at W.G.C. was the building of a new science building to promote science education, which brings us here. This building, now called the Anthropology Building, was completed in 1954 as the Science and Student Activity Building. There was such excitement when it was completed that Georgia Governor Herman Talmadge, the son of former governor Eugene Talmadge, visited campus for the dedication of the Science Building. Students and teachers attended from regional high schools for this major event, as well.W.G.C. remained involved in the regional community throughout the 1950s. The school hosted West Georgia Intercollegiate Debate Tournaments, a music festival with northwest Georgia high schools and elementary school bands, and participated in College Days outreach events at local high schools. Another community collaboration was the West Georgia Health Institute, which met with local community members and health departments to discuss health issues such as mental health, dental health, and children’s health. Though not always involved in every aspect of the community, West Georgia College continued its tradition of remaining connected to northwest Georgia as a regional college.

The Anthropology Building was built in 1954 as the Science and Student Activity Building, on what was previously West Georgia College's campus. It also stands where the Fourth District A&amp;M School-era building Aycock Hall (1908-1944) used to stand before it burned down in 1944. The Anthropology Building is built in the International Style that was popular in the mid-twentieth century. This building has also housed the student center, the post office, and the college bookstore.

Anthropology Building

Our last stop is Miller Hall, also known as the Business Building, which was built around 1958 or 1959. The building was originally built to house the Education Department. By 1935, W.G.C. had a formal Education department, and classes were taught at that time by Asst. Professor Zoe Cowen.As you have probably gathered from this tour, the early history of West Georgia and this region is complicated. West Georgia’s involvement in the community was always important but often unequal. The A&amp;M School was established to bolster the rural communities in the area, but only for white students. West Georgia College partnered with the Rosenwald Fund to improve rural schools and hired a Black supervisor, even though the college remained segregated in a Jim Crow state. And we are ending the tour at Miller Hall, which is part of the story of education training at West Georgia, in addition to its story of African American histories. In 1963, the first African American student to attend West Georgia and graduate was Lillian Williams, who graduated in 1968 with a Masters in Elementary Education and took classes here at Miller Hall. Though she along with other Black faculty and staff helped break the mold of exclusion at West Georgia, she was also part of the college's tradition of improving the surrounding community at a regional university.I ask you to take a look on the map of the stops where this tour has taken you. The area that you toured pretty much compromised the majority of campus through the 1950s. The stories and histories that you learned primarily occurred in this area. Like all histories, the history of this university is not monolithic, but the different communities of people who all have stories here make the history of West Georgia complex, rich, and important to talk about. West Georgia, for better or for worse, has impacted the community as a regional school, and each person with their unique perspective continues to impact West Georgia and this community today. Click the links below to learn more about the Center for Public History and the University History Project at the University of West Georgia.

Miller Hall, also known as the Business Building, was completed in 1959. The building was originally built to house the Education Department. The school built a facade on Miller Hall in the 1990s or early 2000s, but originally it would have looked more similar to the Anthropology Building with its stark, International Style. The University of West Georgia renamed the building Miller Hall in 2014, after Dr. J. Mark Miller, the first dean of what was called the West Georgia College School of Business.


One Space Many Stories: Front Campus History