North Atlanta, Then: A Stone Bungalow Above the Chattahoochee

The Collins-Yardum House in Sandy Springs, photographed August 2, 2006, by Robert A. Bass Hartrampf, Inc. for the National Park Service. Public-domain image, NPS Southeast Regional Office Digital Collection.

In August 2006, a photographer working under contract to the National Park Service made this front view of the Collins-Yardum House, a stone bungalow set among trees above the Chattahoochee River in Sandy Springs. The photograph is now two decades old, but the house reaches farther back.

The exact construction date is not recorded in the deeds. Maintenance records and interior fixtures led an NPS historic-resource study to place it around 1936, with renovations after World War II. Its most unusual feature is the stonework: broad bands of fieldstone broken by large, upright granite slabs. The study found stone construction in fewer than 2 percent of the Craftsman bungalows surveyed in Georgia.

The National Park Service acquired the property in 1979. Americus Gaither, who worked as a gardener and handyman for the Collins family, and his wife, Inez, lived in a smaller caretaker’s house on the property until the mid-1980s. The main house later served as a ranger residence through 2000.

Today, the Collins-Yardum complex remains part of the National Park Service-managed landscape in the Palisades Unit of Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area. Park planning documents continue to identify it as a historic resource—a rare piece of suburban craftsmanship held quietly inside a much larger river corridor.

Sources: National Park Service photograph record and public-domain notice; NPS Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area Historic Resource Study; NPS Comprehensive Trails Management Plan.

Share a piece of your North Atlanta

Have a photograph from growing up here—a school day, a family gathering, a neighborhood shop, a ball game, or an ordinary moment that means something to you? We’d love to see it. Photos from your parents’ or grandparents’ albums, and from more recent years, are welcome too. Send a digital copy to info@northatlantastar.com with “North Atlanta, Then” in the subject line. Tell us where and roughly when it was taken, who is pictured if you know, and the story behind it. Include your name, town and the photographer’s name if known. Please send only photographs you own the rights to or have permission to share for publication. Selected photographs and memories may appear in North Atlanta Star, with permission and credit.

Also this Sunday: read Oscar Wilde’s “The Selfish Giant” and take the North Atlanta Sunday Quiz. Explore The Sunday Page archive.