Georgia School for the Deaf Historic District

Georgia's school for deaf children has occupied this four-acre campus in Cave Spring since its founding in 1847. The historic district holds four older buildings, one postwar dormitory, a landscaped west lawn and connecting walks and courtyards. Fannin Hall, begun in 1849 as a simple gabled brick building, was extended in the 1850s, given Victorian Gothic ornament in the 1880s and remodeled in Colonial Revival style in the 1920s, which gives it its present mansard-roofed look. Two brick dormitories, one built in 1907, stand behind it. Across Padlock Street is an 1894 industrial arts building, cruciform in plan, with round arches and corbelled brick in a Romanesque Revival manner. The district was listed for its architecture, its surviving campus landscape and its role in deaf education. The school was the tenth state-supported school for the deaf in the United States, and its shoemaking and printing programs served the Cave Spring community.