West Avenue-Roberts Street Residential Historic District

This residential neighborhood in Lavonia, Georgia, covers about 20 acres along West Avenue and Roberts Street, just west of the central business district. It contains roughly two dozen houses and a small city park. Most homes date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and are wood-framed Victorian cottages or mostly brick Craftsman bungalows, plus one concrete block house. Notable examples include the Judge Allen house, with its multiple gables and fluted piers, and the Queen-Sewell-Richey house, whose porch detailing is unmatched elsewhere in the surrounding survey area. At least one bungalow was probably designed by Atlanta architect Leila Ross Wilburn. The district matters for its architecture, its shared landscape of lawns, shrubs and pecan trees, and its links to local bankers, merchants, a postmaster and builders who built rental houses. It is also what remains of a larger neighborhood that extended the town's original grid, since reduced by fire and later commercial and residential development.