Andalusia Farm

Main house at Andalusia Farm

NPS Photo

Quick Facts

Location:

2628 North Columbia Street, Milledgeville, Georgia

Significance:

The home of author Flannery O’Connor during her most productive years as a writer.

Designation:

National Historic Landmark

MANAGED BY:

Georgia College & State University

Andalusia Farm was the home of author Flannery O’Connor from 1951, when O’Connor moved there after her diagnosis with lupus, until her death in 1964. In addition to being O’Connor’s home during her most productive years as a writer, Andalusia was the inspiration for the settings of many of her short stories. O’Connor’s unorthodox combination of religious themes, violence, and the grotesque challenged expectations of both religious and Southern gothic literature and continues to influence American writers and artists. Her short stories represent an outstanding example of the resurgence of the short story as a literary art form in the early and mid-twentieth century, and she was one of the leading practitioners of the literary values of the New Criticism.

Andalusia Farm is a 544–acre property situated approximately four miles northwest of the city of Milledgeville in Baldwin County, Georgia, on the west side of North Columbia Street (US 441). The property includes the house where O’Connor lived, as well as agricultural buildings, tenant houses, a livestock pond, fields, and forests. The main house and the Hill House, which is a former slave dwelling that served as a tenant house in the 1950s and 1960s, were built in the mid-nineteenth century. The agricultural buildings, structures, and objects in the farm complex were constructed between 1930 and 1960.

Critical and popular appreciation for Flannery O’Connor’s work increased in the fifty years after her death in 1964. All of her published works remain in print, and her work has inspired numerous American authors and artists. O’Connor herself priviledged religious interpretations in her fiction, and the theological and spiritual dimensions of her work formed a solid foundation for O’Connor scholarship. As scholars built on that foundation and explored other themes and contexts embedded in her fiction, they showed that her works illuminated many of the social and cultural transformations that affected post-World War II America: anxiety about the threat of communism, the rise of civil religion, changing gender roles, increased class mobility, and challenges to racial segregation and inequality. Her implicit commentary on these topics in her fiction, essays, and letters reveal contradictory messages that challenge readers to consider not only how historical context shapes fiction, but also the nature of religion, gender, race, and class. The complexity and contradictions of both the author and her fiction remain compelling and continue to sustain critical and popular interest in Flannery O’Connor’s work. 

Another theme that has engaged O’Connor scholars is the role that illness and disability played in the author’s life, theology, and writing. In stories like “The Lame Shall Enter First” and “Revelation,” O’Connor describes prosthetics and medical treatment. The rise of vocational rehabilitation after World War II shaped O’Connor’s understandings of disability. These stories also demonstrate how she wrestled with her own identity as a disabled person. O’Connor endured many hospital stays prior to her arrival at Andalusia Farm. She had limited mobility and lived with pain that slowed the pace with which she could write. But she also remarked to a friend, “When you can't be too active physically, there is nothing left to do but write so I may have a blessing in disguise." Examples of O’Connor’s experience of living with disability are still on display at Andalusia Farm. These include handrails near the bathtub and the kitchen porch. Metal crutches and handrails supported O’Connor’s ability to navigate the world around her.

The property was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and officially designated as a National Historic Landmark by the Secretary of the Interior in 2022. Andalusia Farm is open to the public. For more information click on the link under "Managed By" on the right side of this webpage.

You can learn more about O’Connor in her own words by reading: Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988).