Carmel Rural Historic District

Carmel is a rural community in northeastern Meriwether County, Georgia, centered on the crossroads of State Route 362 and County Road 324. Families from South Carolina's Edgefield District settled the area in the late 1820s and early 1830s, and the district's earliest building is a c.1830 double-pen log house built by Robert Caldwell. Surviving resources include log houses, gable-ell and Georgian cottages, a Queen Anne cottage, a New South cottage created by a 1910 remodel of an 1880 house, and the 1890 Mount Carmel Methodist Church with Gothic Revival elements. Cemeteries, a barn and former fields complete the landscape. Farming shaped the area, from small yeoman farms to larger enslaved-labor operations, and later to lespedeza and pine tree farming in the late 1930s and 1940s. The district was listed for its architecture and its record of settlement and agricultural change, although several buildings, including the post office house and the academy, have been lost.