Open to the general public Tuesday - Friday from 10AM to 4PM, excluding major holidays. *Reservations are currently required, at least 24 hours in advance.* The original part of the house was a four over four “Plantation Plain” built about 1834. The house was a wedding gift in 1844 from Joseph Henry Lumpkin, the first Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, to his daughter Marion and T.R.R. In
the late 1840s, Cobb enlarged his relatively modest home to include additional rooms. By 1852, he added the signature octagonal wings and an imposing two story portico with Doric columns, an aesthetic development consistent with the construction of other stately Greek revival mansions that defined the architecture of antebellum Athens. Following Cobb’s death in 1862, Marion continued to live in the house until 1873 when she sold it. The house was next used as rental property, fraternity house, and boarding house, until purchased in 1962 by the Archdiocese of Atlanta for the use of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. In the 1980s, St. Joseph’s plans for a school necessitated finding a new home for the historic house. The Stone Mountain Memorial Association stepped forward in 1984, bought the house for $1, and moved it to Stone Mountain Park near Atlanta the following year. Due to a lack of funding, the house was never restored at Stone Mountain Park. For nearly 20 years the house sat on the same cinder blocks on which it had originally been placed when it arrived at the park. In 2003, the Watson-Brown Foundation, working with the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation and the Athens-Clarke Heritage Foundation, bought the house from the Stone Mountain Memorial Association. A generous grant from the Stone Mountain Memorial Association helped move the home back to Athens in the spring of 2004. The Watson-Brown Foundation then began a painstaking restoration of the house to its 1850 appearance. It opened in 2007 as a historic house museum. In 2008, the Georgia Trust awarded the T.R.R. Cobb House its Preservation Award for excellence in restoration.
