Peacock Woods-Dimon Circle Historic District

Entered as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places, March 26, 2003
The Peacock Woods - Dimon Circle Historic District is located east of downtown Columbus, the county seat of Muscogee County, and is roughly bounded by 17th Street on the north, Cherokee Avenue on the west, 13th Street on the south, and Forest Avenue on the east. The district is located in a much larger area of early to mid-20th century suburban development.

Summary Description from National Register Nomination 2003
" The Peacock Woods - Dimon Circle Historic District is an early-to mid-20th century residential neighborhood in Columbus, Muscogee County. The district is composed primarily of four subdivisions that were platted from 1922 to 1928. The district contains an excellent collection of early- to mid-20th century house types and styles built from 1922 to 1954, with a majority of the houses constructed before 1939. Common house types in the district include English cottage, English house, Georgian house, Georgian cottage, bungalow, and ranch. Many of the houses in the district were designed by well-known architects and represent popular styles of the period in Georgia. Architectural styles represented in the district include Colonial Revival, Craftsman, Tudor Revival, and Spanish Colonial Revival. A few historic apartment buildings are located in the southwest corner of the district.

The district also includes a unique example of a 1954 California ranch house designed by Finch, Barnes, and Paschal (later FABRAP) with landscaping designed by landscape architect Thomas D. Church of San Francisco. The neighborhood was never a streetcar suburb of Columbus but built for automobiles as reflected in its remaining historic garages, back alleyways, and original driveways consisting of two narrow, paved strips. As a planned, early 20th-century residential neighborhood, the district's character-defining features include curvilinear streets, informal landscaping, and uniform setbacks in a park-like setting."

The following description was prepared by Tracy Dean and John Lupold of the Department of History, Columbus State University and edited with additional information by Gretchen Brock, National Register Coordinator, Historic Preservation Division. "Peacock Woods-Dimon Circle Historic District", draft National Register of Historic Places Form, August 2000. On file at the Historic Preservation Division, Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Atlanta, Georgia.

" Within the Peacock Woods - Dimon Circle Historic District, tree-shaded streets curve over and around rolling hills on which are nestled middle- and upper-class residences dating primarily from the 1920s and 1930s. The terrain is dominated by hills that rise on the eastern side of Weracoba Creek (outside of the district.) The landscape is dominated by towering hardwoods and pines, some of which pre-date the trees planted almost 80 years ago by developers and the original homeowners.

In terms of its context as a neighborhood in the Wynnton section of Columbus, this district is unique because it does not contain an antebellum house. Except for the small strip of property on the east side of Forest Avenue, the land within the district was part of the original property purchased by John Banks in 1836. It functioned as a large back yard for The Cedars, Banks' antebellum house (not in the district, listed in the National Register of Historic Places on November 23, 1971, and located adjacent to the Peacock Woods-Dimon Circle Historic District at 2037 13th Street). Banks' descendants, the Peacock family, sold three large unoccupied, wooded tracts of this land in 1876, 1880, and 1887 to Charles W. Munro and John F. Flournoy (of the Muscogee Real Estate Company.)

The Peacock Woods - Dimon Circle neighborhood was never a streetcar suburb; its residents drove their automobiles to town. Most of the houses being built after 1925, when the Columbus city limits was expanded to include the Wynnton area, meant that the residents could use the new concrete viaduct over the railroad yard into downtown Columbus. The surviving historic driveways and garages represent the automobile-oriented nature of the subdivisions. Approximately 1/4 of the houses in the district have original driveways consisting of two narrow strips of pavement with grass in the center. Houses in Wynnton Heights subdivision along Cherokee Avenue and Dimon Street are served by a gravel back-alley and do not have driveway access on the front of their lots. Several of the homes in the district have maintained their original garages. Some of the houses in the Peacock Woods subdivision (along Summit, Brookside, and Flournoy drives and Forest Avenue) retain their two-story garages executed in the style of the house with an apartment on the upper story.

Houses throughout the district represent popular architectural styles in Georgia during the early to mid-20th century in Georgia. Almost half of the houses in the district were built in the Tudor Revival style with the remaining houses built in the Colonial Revival, Craftsman, Spanish Colonial Revival, and French Vernacular Revival styles. In terms of its architecture, this district has more high-style houses than the surrounding early 20th century subdivisions. The scale of its houses and the degree of ornamentation are more similar to the nearby Wynn's Hill-Overlook Historic District (pending in 2002) and Dinglewood (listed in the National Register of Historic Places on November 21, 2001) than they are to other Wynnton area suburbs. While documentation for specific architects only exists for 37 houses, at least another dozen houses in Peacock Woods were probably designed by a professional architect. Probably 45 to 50 percent of the houses in the district had plans drawn by an architectural firm.

The typical house in the district is brick, Tudor Revival in style, and built in the 1930s. There are also wood-sided and stucco houses. Stone is also a predominant material in the district because of the popularity of the Tudor Revival style and the stone houses in the Rock Park subdivision. Most homes in the district are either one- or one-and-a-half stories, the exceptions being a few two-story houses in the southern portion of the district and almost all the buildings in the Peacock Woods subdivision which are large, two-story houses."