Hay House

William Butler Johnston made his fortune in banking and finance, and in the 1850s he and Anne Tracy Johnston set out to build a home unlike anything in Georgia. They took a long European wedding trip, absorbing the villas and palaces of Italy, and returned determined to bring that grandeur home. The result was a mansion of some 18,000 square feet across seven levels, crowned by a three-story cupola.

The craftsmanship inside is staggering. Walls painted to imitate marble and carved stone, elaborate plasterwork, stained glass, and richly worked woodwork fill room after room. During the Civil War the house is said to have hidden Confederate valuables and served as a secret depository, and stories of concealed rooms have long clung to it, some true, some the stuff of legend.

For a house built in the 1850s, the Hay House was astonishingly modern. It had an indoor plumbing system with hot and cold running water and flushing toilets, a rarity anywhere in America at the time, along with a coal-fired central heating system and a clever passive ventilation scheme that drew air up through the house and out the cupola to keep it cool in the Georgia heat.

A network of speaking tubes let the family communicate between floors and summon staff, an early intercom of sorts. These systems, ordinary today, were the height of innovation before the Civil War, and they are part of why the house so impresses modern visitors who expect a mid-1800s home to be far more primitive.

The Johnstons' descendants lived in the house into the twentieth century, and in 1926 it was bought by Parks Lee Hay, an insurance executive, whose family gave the house the name it carries today. The Hays furnished it richly and eventually opened it to the public, and in time it passed to a preservation organization that operates it as a house museum.

Because it stayed in careful hands and was never gutted or heavily altered, the Hay House survives with much of its original detail intact. Guided tours move through its levels telling the story of the families who lived there, the craftsmen who built it, and the enslaved and later hired workers whose labor ran the household.

The Hay House sits in a city rich with history and music. Macon was a cotton and railroad center in the 1800s, and in the twentieth century it gave the world Little Richard, Otis Redding, and the Allman Brothers Band, whose old home is a museum across town. The city's Ocmulgee Mounds preserve one of the great ancestral Mississippian sites in the Southeast.

Macon is perhaps most famous each spring, when hundreds of thousands of Yoshino cherry trees bloom across the city and a festival celebrates the display. A visit to the Hay House pairs naturally with the city's other antebellum homes, its music landmarks, and a walk along the Ocmulgee River.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.