Aunt Fanny's Cabin Proposal Deadline Extended; Memorial For Namesake Planned Regardless

SMYRNA, GA — As more people push to save Aunt Fanny's Cabin from demolition, Smyrna City Council members will vote to extend the purchase proposal deadline for the cabin to mid March, city officials said Thursday night.

Council will vote Monday night to extend the deadline for someone to buy and move the cabin to March 16 at 10 a.m. Most council members spoke in support of the extended deadline at a Thursday work session following pressure from residents and a man who's interested in preserving the structure, but hasn't have enough time to finalize his bid.

"Aunt Fanny's Cabin has been sitting there for 25 years. Forty-five days more is not going to make any difference to us either way," Councilman Charles Welch said.

The 19th century cabin once housed a famous restaurant with a tangled racial background and was named after Fanny Williams, a Black woman who worked as a housekeeper for Smyrna's Campbell family.

Williams was also an early civil rights advocate in Cobb County and metro Atlanta, credited with helping found the state's first all-Black hospital in Marietta and taking on the Ku Klux Klan, the Marietta Daily Journal reported.

Based on task force recommendations, council voted Dec. 20 to demolish the cabin due to its complicated past — the once-popular restaurant eventually became known for using derogatory depictions of Black people for entertainment — and high cost for renovation or preservation, after the city failed to properly maintain the building for years.

The city left the bid process open until Tuesday, but no official purchase bids were submitted by the deadline; however, two different kinds of requests were submitted.

One proposal came from the Coalition to Save Aunt Fanny's Cabin, which protested outside the cabin Monday night over the potential demolition. The group, along with the Cobb NAACP, urged council to either stabilize the cabin where it's at, scan the building so a replica could be built, or save features of the cabin and rebuild the remainder.

Mayor Derek Norton said none of those options fit the bill for what was voted on Dec. 20.

But the proposal that grasped council members' attention was one from a man named Philip Ivester, who responded to the bid with a request for an extension.

Ivester is a preservationist who lives just outside the city limits, and has been involved with the Friends of the Concord Covered Bridge Historic District. He said he wants to move the cabin to his 11-acre property on Concord Road, but a builder who could help him move and restore it wasn't available until mid-February.

He also said he's been dealing with family medical issues, and the surge in COVID-19 cases between the Dec. 20 vote and Tuesday's deadline prevented him from meeting with other parties, the Marietta Daily Journal reported.

Regardless of what happens to the cabin, Norton and other council members have already committed to creating a proper memorial for Williams at the site of the existing cabin.

"No matter if you were for the cabin being saved or for it being demolished, or whatever you were for, everybody 100 percent was for memorializing Fanny Williams appropriately," Norton said Thursday.

However, some argue that her story can't be told without the cabin.

"We do not want to continue to erase the history of our people," said Jeriene Bonner Grimes, president of the Cobb County chapter of the NAACP, at a press conference Monday pushing for council not to demolish Aunt Fanny's Cabin. "[Fanny Williams] was very significant, she was a freedom fighter, she was an advocate."

Related:

• Future Of Aunt Fanny's Cabin Up For Discussion, Again: Report
• Calls To Save Aunt Fanny's Cabin Come As Deadline Looms
• Aunt Fanny's Cabin To Be Demolished Unless Sold: City Council
• Fate Of Aunt Fanny's Cabin To Be Decided By City Council Monday
• Aunt Fanny's Cabin Could Be Repaired, Demolished Or Preserved