Lower Avenue A Historic District

Nine modest frame houses line the east side of Avenue A in Rome, Georgia, between North Fifth Street and Turner-McCall Boulevard. Built from the 1880s to the 1920s, they sit on uniform 50 by 200 foot lots with well-kept lawns. All but one are a single story, all have porches, and several have a small central front gable above the porch roof. Some are duplexes with two small front porches. The area began as part of DeSoto, a suburban village west of the Oostanaula River that Rome annexed in 1885 and that grew quickly after a bridge opened in 1886, a streetcar line arrived and nearby industries provided jobs. The houses are an intact record of the housing once common for Rome's lower-middle class, and few comparable groups survive in the city. Turner-McCall Boulevard, widened in the 1960s, now separates this block from the larger Upper Avenue A district to the north.