Sight Seeing in Atlanta

I arrived in Atlanta on Monday for this year's Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. The conference officially started on Tuesday night, so we had a bit of time to explore before registering. There's lots of great stuff we wanted to see, but settled on the Atlanta History Center.

On the grounds are two old buildings that you can tour. The first we went to was at the old farm house.



I found this tour pretty fascinating because my husband Andrew and I own an old farm house as well, and it turns out that the style of house found in rural Georgia in the mid 1800's is a lot like ours. The clapboard exterior matched exactly, and they had pine floors, just like us. One of the noticeable differences, however, was that their windows had a grid pattern and were thus likely made out of smaller panes of glass put together. Our windows (still original!) have just one large pane of glass for the whole upper or lower part.

We had fun posing in the kitchen outbuilding.



After that tour, we headed to the Swan House. It's a fancy house built in 1928 in the style of an old English country home. It's massive with columns! It's very ornate inside too, where photography was not allowed. A little too ornate in some cases. Neat to see the original showers from the 20's though - apparently they thought that washing your dirt away was more sanitary than sitting in it. Makes sense to me.



Other than that, we took a quick look at the Abraham Lincoln special exhibit that showcased a collection of original documents related to his life and presidency, and learned about the Civil War.

You can click on any of the above images for a larger view, and see the whole collection of my Atlanta and Grace Hopper shots here (I will be adding to them over the course of the week).