213 Adams Street: A Historic Home Over Time
The Story of the Leila Ross Wilburn Designed Home in the MAK Historic District
Leila Ross Wilburn: An Architect with a Plan
Figure 1. Portrait of Leila Ross Wilburn, date unknown (McCain Library Special Collections and Archives: Leila Ross Wilburn collection, Agnes Scott College).
Architect Leila Ross Wilburn was born in 1885 in Macon, Georgia (Figure 1). After noticing her talent for drawing, her father, Joseph Gustavus Wilburn, paid for her to take architectural drafting lessons. She went on to attend Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. Given her training, she was able to obtain a job as a draftsperson at the Atlanta architecture and construction firm B.R. Padgett and Sons where she sharpened her skills as an architect. In 1908, at age 23, she left to open her own architectural office in Atlanta. Some of her first commissions included private residences in Atlanta as well as apartment complexes for developers. During the early years of her practice, Wilburn provided “residential house plans to builders and developers who were constructing homes in the Atlanta area.” [1] Six years later, she published her first plan book. A plan book or pattern book is a book of architectural plans sold to homeowners that provides information about the plan and exterior of a home to the non-architect. In the early 20th c., property owners ordered the plan book to flip through the designs, usually between thirty and forty, select a plan, and then pay for the architectural drawings and the materials. Wilburn's plan book business allowed her to extend her reach as an architect and set her practice apart. Through her plan book business, Wilburn sought to provide modest well-priced architect-designed homes to a wider middle-class audience. Her plan books were mail order, so her homes could be constructed anywhere, but they were particularly popular in Decatur, where Wilburn herself lived. We do not know for sure how many of her houses were built, as some have since been demolished, but many of her houses are preserved in the MAK (McDonough, Adams, Kings-Highway) Historic District (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Map of the MAK Historic District with 213 Adams Street marked.
213 Adams Street
Figure 3. Page eighty-three of Southern Homers and Bungalows, 1914, with floor plan, image, and description for 213 Adams Street (Southern Homes and Bungalows, McCain Library Special Collections and Archives: Leila Ross Wilburn collection, Agnes Scott College).
The design for 213 Adams Street, marked on the map of the MAK Historic District, comes from plan #746 on page eighty-three in Wilburn’s second plan book Southern Homes and Bungalows (Figure 3). This home has gone through many different iterations in its lifetime. In 2002, it was sold to Joe and Mae Bergin who found the home stripped of its period details and extensively restored the home. The house was sold again in 2018 and bought in by homeowner M and her husband. The images for this building biography come from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution article written on the Bergins' period restoration, the Zillow listing of the house, and the Hayes-Little Studio redesign featured on the architects’ website as well as in Architectural Digest. Comparing how this home has changed and what has stayed the same from the 1914 plan in Southern Homes and Bungalows, this building biography will first explore the logic that governed Wilburn’s designs and plans. Articulating the original design principles will help us to understand how Wilburn’s plans were attuned to the needs of the homeowner in the South and, subsequently, the Southern real estate market. Finally, it examines how Wilburn’s plan, preserved in a historic district, has held up over time as the needs and desires of homeowners have changed from when the plan was originally conceived.
Wilburn's Plan Realized
213 Adams Street is a two-story bungalow-style home based on the American Four-Square Plan, which had four rooms on the ground floor and four rooms on the second story. 213 Adams is a modified Four-Square plan, with the fourth room on the second story being the sleeping porch. The American Four Square was born out of the Arts and Crafts movement, which countered ornate Victorian styles with more humble handcrafted wooden accents. Since Wilburn was designing plans for a wide audience, her version was, of course, less artisanal and more accessible. Her plan books span from 1914 to 1960, and though the exteriors of her houses go through changes, and certain spaces expand and contract based on the needs of the homeowner, economy, and what was in fashion at the time, the logic of her plans remains consistent.
Her plans are governed by a clear delineation of the public and private spaces with a keen eye toward a homeowner who entertains. Looking at the plan, we can see a clear hierarchy of spaces and understand how Wilburn intended the user to move through the house (Figure 4). The veranda, a porch space spanning the width of the house, acted as an outdoor living room during the summer months when it was too hot to entertain indoors, as centralized air conditioning was not common at the time the house was designed and built.
Moving into the living room, which is the largest space on the ground floor, the visitor or the homeowner is greeted with the sight of a grand wooden staircase to the left and a brick fireplace to the right (Figure 5). These two decorative but functional features ground the living room space. In the description for this plan, Wilburn highlights the stairs as “quite the addition to the room.” [2]
In the home's original conception, this is where guests would be received. Entering the space, they may have encountered a reception table, a social space where drinks and talk would occur before guests moved into the dining room for a sit-down dinner. The dining room is the logical next step in the progression of public spaces as it has a wider doorway than the narrow corridor that leads to the kitchen (Figure 6). The kitchen, a more private space, is tucked away at the back of the house and is considerably smaller than the dining and living spaces.
The downstairs encompasses all the public/entertainment-centered spaces of the home, while the upstairs encompasses the private domain with the bedrooms. In some of her one-story houses, she executed this separation of public and private by dividing the house down the center with public spaces on one side and private spaces on the other. The plan book version of this house includes a sleeping porch that would have been used similarly to the veranda in the hotter months as an outdoor bedroom, but it was never completed at 213 Adams Street. Wilburn also took care to make sure every bedroom had windows on two walls, which ensured ventilation (Figure 7). Both how she separated the public and private spaces of the home, as well as her attention to the climate of the south, persisted through all her plan books.
The logic of her plans remained essentially the same in subsequent plan books, so Wilburn was able to spend more time attending to the exterior of the home and adding amenities to the interior of the home (Figure 8). She said of her interiors,
“All cozy corners and jigsaw work have been abolished and in place is found such useful built-in furniture and artistic effects such as bookcases, window seats, buffets, plate rails, ironing boards, concealed beds, colonnades, and beamed ceilings.”
Leila Ross Wilburn, Southern Homes and Bungalows [3]
213 Adams has two built-in bookshelves in the living room and wood detailing throughout the house: wood beams, window frames, and the wood staircase as a focal point of the living room (Figure 9). In her writing, she took care to emphasize where these details were added, particularly attending to the closet space. Wilburn was not unique in producing plan books, but her emphasis on meeting the needs of the southern homeowner, the amenities provided, and the appearance of the house from the exterior was how she sought to set her plans apart.
Adaptable Plans
Due to the wide reach of her plan books and the consistent logic of her plans, Wilburn was able to adjust to both the shifting real estate market and the economic situation of home buyers, allowing her to have a career spanning almost four decades. LeeAnn Lands’ article, “Be a Patriot, Buy a Home: Re-Imagining Home Owners and Home Ownership in Early 20th Century Atlanta,” provides context for the attitudes surrounding homeownership in Atlanta and the United States between 1900 and 1940, during which time Wilburn released seven of her plan books.
The “Own Your Home Campaign” was launched in 1918 by the U.S. Department of Labor to push Americans to own rather than rent their homes. The campaign sought to address not only the economic conditions that had Americans favoring renting but also the “lack of desire for homeownership.” [4] However, the “Own Your Home Campaign” and subsequent projects offered lower mortgages and affordable housing only to white middle-class Americans and were withheld from Black Americans. The campaign equated the idea of the single-family home with “healthy families and political stability.” [5] The campaign’s “educational material” and sponsored housing expositions pushed a rhetoric of masculine patriotism. Herbert Hoover, the US President at the height of the campaign, “linked homeownership to the maintenance of the nation-state, contending that ‘the present large population of families that own their homes is both the foundation of a sound economic and social system.’” [6] The campaign focused on the owned home as the center of family life, using language such as the following:
An owned home is the ideal environment for child-rearing. An owned home is the ideal environment for family life. Apartment living is detrimental to child development. Apartment living is detrimental to family life.
Lands, “Be a Patriot, Buy a Home,” 950. [7]
The campaign pushed homeownership, not renting, as an ideal that every American family should strive for (Figure 10).
Figure 10. "Own Your Home" Advertisement from the Pittsburgh Courier, 1928 (LeAnn Lands, “Be a Patriot, Buy a Home: Re-Imagining Home Owners and Home Ownership in Early 20th Century Atlanta”).
The “Own Your Home Campaign” campaign reached Atlanta in 1921, a city in which the homeownership rate was low compared to other cities across the country. [8] The rhetoric described above did not significantly change when the campaign came to Atlanta. “Atlanta land investor E.R. Black…asserted that ‘A city of homes would be an independent city, every citizen the monarch of his own home.’” [9] The campaign in Atlanta culminated in a six-day exposition that featured various vendors, one of whom was Leila Ross Wilburn. Most of the rhetoric used by the campaign targeted men as the owners and heads of the household, rarely mentioning women as having any agency in the act of homeownership. However, Lands notes that the exposition in Atlanta did attempt to appeal more to women as well by emphasizing their role in decorating the home, thus targeting women’s role in homeownership. Wilburn marketed her homes as attending to “a woman’s sensibility,” and in her writing, she attended to the decorative details of a home. [10] Wilburn’s presence at the exhibition is a testament to her success in Atlanta and speaks to the ability of her plan books to adapt to different economic conditions.
1914
World War I Begins and Southern Homes and Bungalows was released. In this book, we see Wilburn carve out her unique position within the larger plan book manufacturing business. She emphasized access to affordable architect-designed homes that were uniquely attuned to the South.
1918
World War I Ends
1921
Brick and Colonial Homes was released. Between the publication of Southern Homes and Bungalows in 1914 and Brick and Colonial Homes in 1921, World War I ended, and there was a post-war housing shortage, and Wilburn’s plan books fulfilled the need for good quality, affordable, but unique housing.
1925
Ideal Homes of Today
1927
Homes in Good Taste was released. In the decade following World War I, Wilburn would go on to release three plan books in seven years to accommodate the post-war housing needs. As the United States economy recovered from the war and home buyers had more money to spend, we see her plans and exteriors become larger and more elaborate. Homes in Good Taste featured homes with more bedrooms, entertaining spaces, closets, and drawings for highly ornamented colonial facades.
1929
The Great Depression Begins
1935
Small Low-Cost Homes for the South released. In 1929, the Great Depression began, and in 1935, Wilburn released Small Low-Cost Homes for the South, four years before the Great Depression ended. This plan book continued to follow Wilburn’s logic of dividing public and private spaces, but the homes were much smaller, and Wilburn highlighted the simpler amenities she added to her homes. These homes also often had convertible attics or other rooms that were intended to be rented out, which catered to homeowners who needed a supplemented income to afford the home, and these spaces could be converted when funds allowed.
1938
Sixty Good New Homes
1939
End of the Great Depression
1941
The United States Enters World War II
1944
The G.I. Bill is Passed
1945
World War II Ends
1950
Ranch and Colonial Homes
1960
Bran-New Homes was released. Post-World War II, the G.I. Bill guaranteed veterans who were returning home loans to purchase homes. There was an increased need for housing, and Wilburn’s plan book fulfilled this need. In her final plan book Bran-New Homes, 1960, we see the biggest shift in the logic of Wilburn's plan. With the television becoming more common, the living room shifted from a place to entertain guests to a place for family entertainment. The dining room shrunk, and the living room expanded as Wilburn responded to TV-centric family life. However, the hierarchy of her spaces remained the same. Looking at historical periods in which housing needs were changing, we see that Wilburn was able to adjust and continue working. She was able to expand or contract the spaces of the home and wrap them in whatever decorations were in fashion at the time, setting her practice apart from other plan book architects.
213 Adams in the Present
Figure 11. The Bergins in the restored living room with period furniture (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
What can we learn from a historic home preserved in a historic district in a city like Atlanta, which has an architectural legacy of building over its history? When 213 Adams Street was purchased by the Bergins in 2002, they found it in a state of neglect. Many of Wilburn’s amenities on the interior had been modified. The current owner thinks that when the Bergin’s bought the home the bookshelves had been removed. According to the MAK Historic District’s website the home, “had suffered many changes and “modernizations” through the years, including the “unfortunate painting and alteration of its exterior and changes, and in some cases, removal, to its interior wood trim and details.” [11] Using loaded words like “suffered,” the historic district site makes no attempt to conceal its disdain for change. The Bergins took great care to restore the home to its period state, removing all the paint covering the original wood detailing by hand, restoring the kitchen, stripping the exterior, and building out the amenities that had been removed (Figure 11). Though the sleeping porch Wilburn intended for the home was never built, the Bergins had plans to erect a three-season porch off the back of the house, not uncommon in some of her other plans. The Bergins furnished the home with period furniture and painted the walls a shade of green accurate to the period as well.
When homeowner M bought the house, there had been one owner in between her and the Bergins. She hired Hayes-Little Design Studio to help her design the interior, making use of pieces she already had (Figures 12 and 13). The Hayes-Little redesign of the home is described as “Scandinavian inspired” in Architectural Digest, [12] and homeowner M described it to me as “dark academia.” [13] But we will not dwell on the interior design changes but rather examine how the plan of 213 Adams, designed in 1914, meets the needs of the modern house.
Figure 12. Stair of 213 Adams before and after Hayes-Little Studio redesign (before taken from Zillow, after taken from Hayes-Little Website).
Figure 13. Living room of 213 Adams before and after Hayes-Little Studio redesign (before taken from Zillow, after taken from Hayes-Little Website).
Figure 14. What it would look like to have a modern living room set up in Wilburn's living room space (floor plan taken from Southern Homes and Bungalows couch and TV added)
Speaking with homeowner M, I asked how she thinks about moving through the public spaces of the home upon entering the house. Her answer was telling, as she pointed out the large “unusable” space in what was intended to be the living room, now the dining room. [14] What Wilburn intended as the living room does not meet the modern requirements for such a space. Most living rooms are centered around a couch and television, but because of the central placement of the door, any attempt to render this couch and television set up would block the entryway (Figure 14). The space, homeowner M said, was where guests would have received a drink before being moved to a parlor area of the living room on the right side of the door and then ushered into the dining room. Homeowner M has switched the dining and living room spaces from how Wilburn intended them to account for the modern needs of a living room (Figure 15). 213 Adams is an example of how the arrangements of Wilburn’s public spaces were informed by the needs of homeowners at the time it was built. She could not have anticipated how those needs might change.
Figure 15. Diagram of homeowner M's re-arranging of the living room and dining room spaces (floor plan taken from Southern Homes and Bungalows couch, TV, table added)
Homeowner M also remarked that these historic Wilburn homes are a product of their time and were not built with modern amenities in mind, such as large closets or space for a washer and dryer. While Wilburn boasts her spacious and numerous closets as an asset of her homes, homeowner M noted in jest, “Yeah maybe when you only had three outfits.” [15] When Wilburn published Southern Homes and Bungalows, she was responding to the needs of homeowners at that time, and we see in later plan books how she shrunk or enlarged certain spaces as those needs changed. However, being in a Historic District, there are only so many changes residents are allowed to make because of the regulations placed on their homes. Thus, it is not the structure of the house that present-day homeowners shift but the logic of the spaces. That the current homeowner at 213 Adams has shifted certain spaces to meet their needs does possibly go against the traditional logic of a Wilburn home, but it does not go against the ethos of Wilburn herself. If shifting rooms helps meet the needs of the homeowner, then it is safe to say it would have been fine with Wilburn. It is even safe to say that certain expansions to the home would be in line with the ethos of Wilburn, but there is only so much the homeowners can change of 213 Adams Street.
Conclusion
Historic residential districts are in a unique position in Atlanta. While neighborhoods around them are being regularly torn down and built back up, changing the city's image, the MAK Historic District’s image, especially from the street, is not allowed to change due to rules and regulations about alterations to protected historic homes. Wilburn’s legacy is preserved in the MAK Historic District and is, therefore, a piece of Atlanta’s architectural history. Robert Craig, an architectural historian who focuses on Atlanta, has called Wilburn “the state’s most prolific residential architect.” [16] When she first started working in Atlanta, she shaped the image of what a home in the South was, and in the MAK Historic District, that image remains.
In its architecture, the city of Atlanta is ever looking to the future, so a residential historic district, 213 Adams, and the archive of Wilburn’s pattern books provide a case study of what was valued by architects and homeowners in the past and how those values have shifted. In the case of 213 Adams Street, the exterior appears almost as it did when it was first built, but the interior has been modified to modern and personal tastes. In this way, the home walks the line between the past and Wilburn’s idea of the Southern Home, more generally, the present, and what the individual homeowner wants. In the ever-changing city of Atlanta residents living in historical districts are tasked with being the architectural historians and preservationists of their own homes while also creating a space they want to live in.
Zoe Price, Third Year Student at Emory University Majoring in Art History and Minoring in Architectural Studies
Keywords: Residential Architecture; Southern Home; Leila Ross Wilburn; MAK Historic District; Floor Plan
Bibliography
Boles, Jennifer. "Pioneering female architect Leila Ross Wilburn was one of Atlanta’s most prolific" Atlanta, September 9, 2016 https://www.atlantamagazine.com/homeandgarden/pioneering-female-architect-leila-ross-wilburn-one-atlantas-prolific/
Boykin, Sarah and Susan M. Hunter. Southern Homes & Plan Books, The Architectural Legacy of Leila Ross Wilburn. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018.
Halpern, Linne. “This Eclectic Georgia Home Was Originally Designed by Atlanta’s First Female Architect” Architectural Digest, January 5, 2023. https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/eclectic-georgia-home .
Homeowner M, Interview and home tour of 213 Adams Street, March 23, 2024
Jennings, Jan. “Leila Ross Wilburn: Plan-Book Architect.” Woman’s Art Journal 10, no. 1 (1989): 10–16. https://doi.org/10.2307/1358124 .
Lands, LeeAnn. “Be a Patriot, Buy a Home: Re-Imagining Home Owners and Home Ownership in Early 20th Century Atlanta.” Journal of Social History 41, no. 4 (2008): 943–65. https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.0.0029 .
MAK Historic District. “MAK Home - 213 Adams.” Last modified 2021. https://mak-decatur.org/index.shtml .
“McCain Library Special Collections and Archives: Leila Ross Wilburn Collection.” McCain Library Research Guides and Databases. Last Modified June 22, 2023. https://libguides.agnesscott.edu/speccoll/wilburn .
“A Tour of Leila Ross Wilburn Homes.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. https://www.ajc.com/lifestyles/holiday/tour-leila-ross-wilburn-homes/T66yOfUkiQDcZvMcXQsICM/ .
Wilburn, Leila Ross. Southern Homes and Bungalows. Atlanta: Webb and Vary Co., 1914. https://mak-decatur.org/lrw/SouthernHomesAndBungalows.pdf .
Zillow. “213 Adams St, Decatur, GA 30030.” Accessed March 8, 2024. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/213-Adams-St-Decatur-GA30030/14477054_zpid/ .
