When we passed by the old Mabry Farm homestead building on a nice Sunday afternoon drive, the photo we snapped would turn out to be one of the last to be taken of the historic farmhouse.
On Monday, an East Cobb News reader noted that the structure has been demolished. We swung by there again this afternoon and saw that construction indeed has begun on an 18-home subdivision that was approved for rezoning last year.
The homestead building, which was once part of the Mabry Farm spread (history here), was built in 1915. It’s located on Wesley Chapel Road, just south of Sandy Plains Road, and right across from what will be Mabry Park.
The construction work for that park, also on former farmland owned by the Mabry family, is just getting underway after Cobb commissioners finally approved funding in November.
CSP Development, LLC is putting up 3,000-square-foot homes, or about two per acre, on the nine acres of gentle rolling hillside.
Mabry Farm was established in 1904 and ultimately spanned 220 acres. In a blog post from 2016, local nature artist Ed Cahill—whom we met last summer at the first East Cobb Garden Tour at MacFarlane Nature Park—wrote about his impressions of the Mabry Farm, and his paintings of the surroundings.
In addition to the horses, he noted the flowering trees that dotted the landscape, as well as a tomato barn and other structures that served the many uses of the farm.
Because of the historic nature of the building, the developer was required in a stipulation as part of the rezoning to pay a mitigation fee for historic preservation efforts in Cobb County. Acceptance of that $7,500 payment from CSP Development is on the Cobb Board of Commissioners agenda Tuesday.
Just beyond the construction sites on either side of Wesley Chapel Road are homes and subdivisions similar to what’s going up now, on a vanishing slice of East Cobb’s not-so-distant past.
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