South Madison Avenue-Pannell Road Historic District

At the southeast edge of Monroe, Georgia, two country roads meet at a small cluster of late nineteenth and early twentieth century houses. South Madison Avenue and Pannell Road once carried traffic out of the county seat toward Social Circle and the old settlement of Cowpens, later renamed Pannell. A hamlet of farmhouses and at least one store grew at the crossing by the 1870s and 1880s. The surviving buildings are one and two story frame structures dating from the 1880s to the 1930s. Most are simple vernacular houses with fine Victorian porches, decorative gables, bay windows and, in one case, a decorative metal roof. The largest house is an American Foursquare with a porch of classically inspired half-columns. Residents were mostly middle-class farmers, with one merchant. Later growth from Monroe added newer houses around the crossroads. The district was listed for its architecture and as a representative example of rural crossroads development later enveloped by an expanding city.