Brookhaven Information

Developed in 1910, the Brookhaven Historic District is the oldest planned golf course and country club residential community in Georgia. It consists of three separately platted subdivisions with similar street patterns, houses and landscape features that merged together to create one homogeneous residential neighborhood in northeast Atlanta. At the core of the community is a historic golf course featuring a lake, wooded areas, and the Capital City Clubhouse. The clubhouse was originally built for the Brookhaven Country Club but was purchased by the Capital City Club since most of its members lived in the neighborhood. The houses in the district reflect a continuous and consistent development from 1910 to 1941, by which time a majority of the housing in Brookhaven was completed. Brookhaven was developed from the property of Isham Stovall and Soloman Goodwin, two early landowners in the area. Brookhaven Estates, which included the country club property, was the first subdivision to be platted in 1910. Country Club Estates was laid out in 1929 and the Carleton Operating Company land was platted in 1936. The vast majority of these latter areas were built between the Great Depression and 1942.

Houses include one and two-story buildings finished in wood, brick, stucco, and stone. Most of the houses are designed in Colonial or Georgian Revival styles. They typically have three or five bays, gable hipped roofs, weatherboard or brick exteriors, and front entrances highlighted by a frontispiece doorway, a small portico, or a doorway trimmed with sidelights or over lights. Each lot is richly landscaped with pines and other shade trees, shrubs, ground covers and grass lawns.

History 

On the northern edge of Buckhead, Brookhaven developed as Atlanta's first country club neighborhood. It begins just north of the intersection of Peachtree Road and Peachtree-Dunwoody Road. Its boundaries generally are Peachtree Road on the east, Peachtree-Dunwoody on the west and south and Windsor Parkway on the north.

Now sometimes referred to as West Brookhaven, it is an enclave of large, elegant Tudor, Colonial, Georgian and English cottage homes in a lush landscape of broad, winding streets, densely wooded hollows and gently rolling hills with the Capital City Country Club as its heart.

In what was once Creek Indian land, the area's first white settler was Harris Goodwin, a South Carolinian who homesteaded a tract on both sides of what is now Peachtree Road in the early 1830s. Harris Goodwin later brought his father, Solomon, to the area. The Goodwin home and a small graveyard in which they are buried survive at 3931 Peachtree Road near the intersection of Dresden Drive.

The original log cabin on the Echota Indian Trail was expanded in the 1830s and 1840s into the present home. In 1864, it was a landmark for Federal troops closing in on Atlanta during the Civil War. Goodwin descendants still own the property. The home is the oldest extant house in DeKalb County.

In 1910, 150 acres on the west side of Peachtree was bought by the Mechanical and Manufacturers Club for a golf club to be called Brookhaven. The course, which encircles a large lake and is surrounded by woods, was laid out by course architect Herbert Barker. The original clubhouse was replaced in the 1920s by the present French Provincial structure of mellow stone. Shortly after opening in 1911, the club became part of the downtown Capital City Club and became known as the Capital City Country Club.

In the 1980s, the area was placed on the National Register of Historic Places as the "first planned golf club community in Georgia."