Bowdon Area Historical Society
The last remaining structure from the old Bowdon College Campus 1857-1936 is the Bowdon Methodist Protestant. Church. It has been restored by the Bowdon Area Historical Society and is used as their headquarters. Today this historic church is called the Meeting Place and is open by appointment.
The Bowdon Area Historical Society was chartered in 1985. Wayne Copeland,Richard Mille Replica grandson of one of the founders of the town in 1853, served as the first president.
The Shellnut House
This dogtrot house now rests beside the Meeting Place, and is considered Bowdons oldest residential structure. Judge Nathanial Shelnutt, one of Bowdon founders, built it in 1849.
Numerous families have lived in this house over the years, and since 1975 it has been moved 4 times. Today it serves as a museum on Bowdon history.
Bowdon College Landmark
This Historic Marker resides on the grounds of Bowdon High School and was the previous site of Bowdon College during 1857 to 1936. The Marker reads as follows:
Bowdon College was Georgiaaa???s fifth chartered institution of higher education and first coeducational institution. Bowdon was a frontier community of merchants and yeomen who nourished the growth of a school where earnest students of limited means bettered their lives and their communities.
The college closed its doors briefly when all but two of the students (one blind, one with no arms) entered the Confederate Army. The president, Charles A. McDaniel, and 128 of the 144 students died in the War. Only twice in the history of the school did Bowdon citizens depend upon state funds to sustain the school. After the Civil War Bowdon was one of five Georgia colleges commissioned to provide free tuition to poor and maimed Confederate veterans. The program ended in 1869, and the trustees of the college, under financial strain, boldly voted to become coed. An act creating Bowdon State Normal School was passed in August, 1919.
State funding for Bowdon was terminated but the citizens rallied and continued Bowdon as a junior college from 1934 to 1936. Graduates have carried the honor of the institution into our state and national capitals and throughout the world. From her halls have come educators, doctors, lawyers, journalists, judges, bankers, farmers, industrialists, governors, and senators. ?a?2The college that was founded in the wilderness?a?2 has become ?a?2the Athens of the West?a?2.