This Large Home was built for a Boys Boarding School

Rockby House, Sparta Georgia

Date added: June 01, 2024

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Rockby was built by Richard Malcolm Johnston, an eminent educator and writer on early Georgia education. It is believed that Mr. Johnston built Rockby shortly after 1854 when he purchased the land (602 acres) from Mr. Abner Cook for $5,000. Mr. Johnston was a native of Hancock County, having been born in 1822 on his father's plantation "Oak Grove" near Powelton.

After graduating from Mercer University in 1841, Johnston taught at Mt. Zion Academy near Sparta, but in 1842 decided to study for the bar. He entered the law office of Mr. Henry Cummings in Augusta and was admitted to the bar later that year. He returned to Hancock County and for the next 15 years alternated teaching with a law career.

In 1857 Johnston was offered a professorship of English literature at the University of Georgia, where he taught for four years before establishing a boarding school for boys in Hancock County. Johnston wrote in his autobiography, "At the end of the year I retired to the new settlement made upon the Plantation in Hancock, my native county, preparatory to opening a school for boys. I gave it the name of "Rockby' suggested by the many huge granite bowlders (sic) on the hillside above the Spring in the rear of the mansion."

The method in which Johnston ran the school was revolutionary at the time. In reaction to the strict disciplinary procedures of the rural field schools, he introduced a form of honor system and allowed much more freedom of movement for the students, even allowing them to go to town occasionally. He made recreation a part of the program and even used the mansion for cards, which were allowed under supervision in the drawing room, hall and piazza. Dancing took place in the dining room of the mansion (Johnston's Autobiography). The upper chambers were dormitories for the boarders.

Johnston wrote of his procedures in his autobiography: "I began this school upon a system unlike any other that I had known or heard of … the class beginning with twenty, was engaged several weeks before the opening in January, 1862, made up of sons of leading merchants, lawyers and planters in several portions of the state. At the opening I said to them I should neither practice espionage upon them myself, nor to permit them to practice it … with the intent of reporting to me … than when I regarded it important for me to know about any matter of dereliction I would call them all together and demand that … the guilty should report themselves … if any fail … and the fact should be ascertained … (he) … would at once be dismissed from school … "

In 1863 Johnston became one of Governor Brown's military aides and assisted in organizing the Georgia State Militia. He recruited James Stanley Newman to direct the military exercises, which he instituted at the school in 1864. For 5 1/2 years after its founding, the school was a great success.

In 1867, after the death of one of his daughters, he and his family removed to Baltimore, Maryland, where he opened a school called "Pen Lucy" established after the same methods as Rockby. Due to the depressed financial condition of the South after the Civil War, a sufficient number of southern boarders were unable to come north to school, so Johnston began to take day students from Baltimore. His system was not as successful with day students as it had been with boarders. After six years Johnston closed the school and accepted a position in the U.S. Department of Education. He retired to write in 1886. Among his publications are the Dukesborough Tales, which describes life in rural Middle Georgia, his Autobiography, and a manuscript entitled Early Educational Life in Middle Georgia.

The chain of titles for Rockby after Johnston includes James Stanley Newman, George F. Pierce and James A. Harley, and the Rocker family in whose hands the house still remains today.

Building Description

The principal facade of this two-story, Gothic-style frame house faces south-southwest. The truncated gable roof encloses a full attic lit by dormer windows.

The front door is on the center line of the front facade, flanked by one window on either side, with three evenly spaced windows above. The two dormer windows are centered above the outside windows on this facade; the center attic window resides in a decorative gable. The front door is of the trabeated variety with sidelights. However, in place of the usual transom, there is instead a decorative overdoor consisting of a sawn wood hood and horizontal wooden architrave ornamented with carved bulls eyes. This ensemble is repeated over the two ground-floor windows.

The plan is a four-room, central hall type. The front door leads into the entrance hall. All the doors of the four major rooms on this floor open into this hall. A half-turn stairway, dog-leg, with an intermediate landing, begins on the right side of the hall, rising a full three stories. Opposite the front door, at the far end of the central hall, there is a door similar to the front door, lacking sidelights, which opens onto a back porch. Enclosed ends of the back porch form rooms which extend beyond the width of the house.

The second floor hall, front, is narrowed by two large closets which project into the hall. Four rooms of equal size open into this hall.

The attic consists of two long rooms opening into a central hall. They are lit at each end by dormer windows. A central chimney projects through the center of each room.

The house is elevated several feet above ground on rough quarried granite foundation pillars.

The Gothic style of this house is suggested by exterior details such as the pointed gingerbread molding which extends the length of the front porch. Beneath this molding the porch is also pierced by five arches across the front.

The first-floor front facade windows have been described. The rest of the windows in the house are not as elaborate, having only wooden pedimented lintels.

Gingerbread "drops" in the pointed style ornament at each end of the gable roof, front and rear. A bargeboard in the pointed style dominates the center front gable, which breaks the otherwise horizontal line of the roof.

The two main chimneys located at opposite ends of the roof along the ridge are brick and apparently were designed originally as four separate flues connected at the top by a brick cap with dentils. The openings between these flues have been closed in.

A one-story bay window, also on rough quarried granite pillars, extends from the west side of the southwest (front, left) parlor.

The wings formed by the extension of the back porch are ornamented at the eave line by an applied lattice decoration in wood beneath which is a row of wood dentils. The northeast wing has a small addition extending even further beyond to the east, which appears to have been used as some kind of pantry. Each wing has an inside end-wall chimney.

The front and rear porches are approached by a short flight of wood steps, centrally located.

The interior does not sport Gothic detail, but rather a more restrained Greek Revival. The door and window frames are of the Greek Ear type, and, with the exception of the southwest parlor, all the mantels in the house are alike and are very plain, a rectangular architrave supported by rectangular pilasters, and rectangular shelf. The southwest parlor mantel is wood and marbelized. Its massive proportions and curves give it a definite empire feeling. The overmantel extends to the cornice line.

The pine doors and stair stringers are grained on a golden field, possibly to resemble maple.

The interior walls are plaster on lath, with no evidence of wainscoting or chair rail in any room. There is a molding about three quarters of the way up the walls in the second floor hall and rooms, as well as in the attic rooms. The nails in this molding suggest that it was possibly used for hanging clothes, as these upper rooms were used as dormitory chambers.

The outbuildings consist of a granite milk shed or tool house, a well, what appears to have been a granite root cellar or cold frame, and a wooden smokehouse, which is intact with meat hooks and fire pit. These structures are all located a few feet from the rear of the house.