Heritage Sandy Springs Offers Guided Tours To Adults, Kids

SANDY SPRINGS, GA — Heritage Sandy Springs will make it easier for you to learn more about local history with expanded hours and new guided tours available to the public. The Heritage Sandy Springs Museum is open to the public from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

Guided tours include additional information about the entire historic Heritage Green site. Children’s tours are held at 10:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. Tuesdays and adult tours are provided at 10:30 a.m. Thursdays. Guided tours are $5 per person and last about an hour. No reservations are required.

Children’s tours at the Heritage Sandy Springs Museum enable kids to interact with artifacts, documents, interactive displays and more. The Heritage Clues Tour gives kids the chance to explore each gallery of the museum with a self-guided handbook, allowing them to interact with their local history as they search for specific artifacts including, pictures, art, and tools.

Once complete, their tour guide will ask them questions related to the objects they found in hopes that they understand the history of our community. For those interested in something a little more guided, the “Our Heritage” Tour for kids discusses the history of the Williams and Payne families, the 1860s farmhouse that houses our museum, the Burdette Milk House, and the original sandy spring. All guided tours are $5 per person and last 45-60 minute.

Encompassing the Williams-Payne House, Heritage Green and its historic structures, the organization's Our Heritage Tour for adults will invite you to learn the history of our community by tracing our history through some of the oldest standing structures in the city. This tour begins in front of the museum and walks around nearly 2 acres of our campus.

The Heritage Sandy Springs Museum is located in the re-purposed Williams-Payne House, which is named for the Williams family who built the house and farmed the land from the late 1860s until 1939, at which time the Paynes purchased the home.

Originally located on the present-day corner of Mount Vernon Highway and Ga. 400, the house was moved to Heritage Green in 1985. From 1989 to 2009, the house operated as a historic house museum, which reflected what life would have been like in rural Sandy Springs in the 1860s.

In 2009, initiatives began to convert the house to a history museum housing changing exhibits that reflect our history and culture. Further renovations were completed in 2018 with five galleries dedicated to sharing the history, art, and culture of Sandy Springs. The five galleries include:

Land & People

This anchor exhibit, located in the center gallery, gives visitors the most general overview of Sandy Springs community history. As the most comprehensive exhibit gallery, “Sandy Springs: Land and People” tells the changing story of the community as the home of Native Americans, rural farmers, and modern suburbanites. Interpretive panels depict key transitions in Sandy Springs history, including the Land Rush, Civil War and Reconstruction, the impact of World War II, the area’s growth in the late twentieth century, and the struggle to become a city. This exhibit is made possible by the generosity of the Sandy Springs Society and was recently updated with new collection material in 2018.

Wit in Wood

Former resident Moses Young Robinson (b. 1845) began his whittling hobby at the age of 70. Without training or lessons of any kind, Robinson carved materials he found around his farm and home into the figures and animals he saw in the world around him. Peach pits and hickory nuts became turtles, baskets, and birds. Discarded wood became armies of soldiers and small toys. Robinson created thousands of miniatures, hundreds of which are held in the permanent archives at Heritage Sandy Springs. The Wit in Wood display is made possible by a generous gift from the Colonial Dames of America, Chapter XXIV.

Painting from Life

The Heritage Sandy Springs Museum’s newest art installation is entitled Painting from Life. The works displayed are representative samples of the Painting from Life class, which is part of several core fine art classes offered at the Dorothy C. Benson Multipurpose Senior Complex. The focus of the class is to paint from a live subject or location, which challenges the students to make quick but accurate observations and translate them to the canvas. Participants tend to paint locally to capture the world they are familiar with and live in daily. Heritage Green is one of the students’ favorite places to paint; it offers a variety of subjects from plants and flowers to the Sandy Springs Society Gazebo, Heritage Sandy Springs Museum, and – of course – the original Sandy Springs.

Our Heritage

Heritage Green is the heart of the Sandy Springs community! Heritage Sandy Springs (HSS) has been the steward of the Spring Site, Community Park, and historic landmarks around the park for more than three decades. This special exhibit, located in the entrance gallery and gift shop, highlights the beginning of Heritage Green and our work preserving Sandy Springs’ history for thirty years. Learn about how the Arts and Heritage Society Inc. (the predecessors to HSS) saved the original spring site from development, as well as the history of the Williams-Payne house (now the HSS Museum) and the Burdette Milk House – one of the oldest standing structures in Sandy Springs. All function today on the Heritage Green historic site as testaments to our shared history and rich cultural identity.

A Tribute to Athos Menaboni

Italian-born artist Athos Rodolfo Giorgio Alessandro Menaboni (b. 1895) arrived in Georgia in the late 1920s. His early career focused primarily on painting murals and creating other decorative features for clients in the Atlanta area. He worked with famed architect Philip Shutze at the Swan House, The Temple, and the Capital City Club. Following these commissions, he worked with architect Samuel Inman Cooper painting murals at Glenridge Hall. Today, Menaboni is best known for his numerous paintings of more than 150 different species of birds, usually in pairs, and in their natural habitats, many of which he painted while at his home in Sandy Springs. This small display at the Heritage Sandy Springs Museum includes three samples of Menaboni's work including a rare depiction of a nest of hatchlings.

The Heritage Sandy Springs Museum is located at 6075 Sandy Springs Circle. For more information, visit the organization's website. You may also contact Keith Moore, director of Curatorial & Educational Affairs, at curator@heritagesandysprings.org or 404-851-9111 ext 2.

Image via Heritage Sandy Springs