Dr. C. C. Hart is listed as physician of the Cross Keys community in the 1879 Georgia Gazeteer.
The second page of the 1879 Georgia Gazeteer report on Cross Keys lists other key figures of the day, including teacher and store owner J. H. Polk.
Harts Mill Road is named for Dr. C. C. Hart-physician, landowner, and mill owner. The road runs between Chamblee Dunwoody Road and Ashford Dunwoody Road. A section of Harts Mill Road serves as the line between the two cities of Chamblee and Brookhaven. The same road was previously called Sexton Road, named for the Sexton family. I am currently researching this family and will share more in a future blog post.
Christopher Columbus Hart was born in North Carolina in 1843. He attended Emory School of Medicine, completing the program in 1866. He met Cynthia T. Bankston in Georgia and they married in 1869.
The Hart home was located along Peachtree Road, at the same place where later stood a sanitorium, then Veteran’s Hospital #48 and today’s DeKalb Services Center. The sanitorium was known as King Sanitorium for the doctor who ran it and was bought by the United States government in 1919 to become Veterans Hospital #48. Sanitorium was the named used in those days for a hospital that provided long term care, often for illnesses such as tuberculosis. (Atlanta Constitution, King Sanitorium, Beyond Buckhead Purchased by U. S., December 24, 1919).
The Hart corn mill was located along Nancy Creek. The mill house for Hart’s Mill was located where Oglethorpe Apartments were later built, home to today’s Blackburn Park. (Vivian Price, The History of DeKalb County 1822-1900). According to the 1890 Georgia tax digest, Hart accumulated two hundred seventy-eight acres in Cross Keys (now Brookhaven and Chamblee) valued at approximately $1,500.
In 1896, Hart was called to testify in a murder case. The victim was his former business partner, J. H. Polk. In addition to serving as physician for the community and owning a corn mill, Dr. C. C. Hart had managed the local Cross Keys store along with Polk. Hart was called to the scene of the crime and later called to testify. Both C. C. Hart and J. H. Polk’s names can be found in a listing for Cross Keys, DeKalb County in Shole’s Georgia State Gazeteer and Business Directory of 1879. C. C. Hart is listed as a physician and J. H. Polk as a teacher.
Dr. C. C. Hart died in 1899 and is buried at Prospect Cemetery in Chamblee. When he died, the corn mill closed. The 1900 census shows Cynthia Hart still living in Cross Keys as a widow with four children. Her oldest daughter is twenty-five and teaching school, while her youngest is 5 years old. Their name lives on with the road we know as Harts Mill Road.