Forest Grove

Forest Grove is a farmstead southeast of Sandersville, Georgia, built around a one-story frame house of about 1840 that is four rooms wide, with a door from each room onto a full-width front veranda. Thomas Jefferson Warthen purchased the land in 1840, and it has remained in the same family and been farmed continuously since. A rear ell was added about 1895. The interior keeps plaster walls, heart pine floors, Greek Revival mantels and door surrounds, and grained doors. Surrounding the house are a mid-1840s smokehouse, a detached kitchen and chicken coop rebuilt after the Civil War, an 1880s schoolhouse, a barn, a scale house, a windmill and a c. 1910 carriage house. A family cemetery holds 24 graves, and ruins of a gristmill, cotton gin, blacksmith shop and tenant houses mark former activity. The property was listed for its agricultural importance, its unusual farmhouse design and its intact working landscape of paths, farm roads and fields.