This Brookhaven story is an appropriate time for me to pay tribute to Rebecca Chase Williams. I met Rebecca in 2015, when she asked me to collect and consolidate Brookhaven history. This led to us co-authoring “Images of America: Brookhaven.” I am deeply saddened by her passing last month, but I am also honored to have met and worked alongside such an amazing reporter, community activist, Mayor, author, wife, mother and woman.
What do Dr. C. C. Hart, Dr. J. Cheston King, Veterans Hospital #48, DeKalb Services Center and Brookhaven Park all have in common? At one time or another, they all were located on the southwest corner of Peachtree Road and Osborne Road. DeKalb Services Center and Brookhaven Park are located there today.
Starting from the earliest known owner, Dr. Christopher Columbus Hart was born in 1843. He attended Emory Medical School. He and his wife Cynthia Bankston Hart accumulated over 339 acres in the Cross Keys District of DeKalb County.
Although the Hart home was on Peachtree Road at Osborne Road, they also owned a corn mill along Nancy Creek in the area where Harts Mill Road is now located. The mill house was further east along what is now Ashford Dunwoody Road, in the area which is now Blackburn Park.
The next owner of record is Dr. J. Cheston King. Dr. King opened three sanitariums in the early part of the twentieth century; they were Howell Park Sanitarium in the West End area of Atlanta, Cheston King Sanitarium on Peachtree Road, and Cheston King Sanitarium in Stone Mountain. A sanitorium or sanitarium was a hospital that provided long term care, often for treatment of illnesses such as tuberculosis. Dr. King’s sanitarium in Brookhaven is described as a place for the treatment of nervous and mental diseases. (Atlanta Constitution, Dr. Cheston King Dies at Hospital, February 7, 1926 and King Sanitarium, Beyond Buckhead, Purchased by US, December 24, 1919).
Dr. King graduated from the Atlanta College of Surgery in 1895. His name also shows up in meetings held during the years prior to construction of a new campus for Oglethorpe University on Peachtree Road.
In 1919, Dr. King sold the sanitarium on Peachtree Road to the United States government. The government purchased the building and property for an “emergency hospital for uniformed men and employees of the government.” This hospital would become Veteran’s Hospital #48. It was located near World War I Camp Gordon but had no direct association with the camp.
Veterans Hospital #48 was rebuilt in 1929 on the same site. The hospital remained in use until 1966 when the new Veteran’s Hospital was built on Clairmont Road. Veteran’s Hospital #48 was demolished in 1969, according to Franklin Garrett’s Atlanta and Environs Volume II.
Today the property is home to DeKalb Services Center and Brookhaven Park. DeKalb Services Center has been at this corner since 1978, serving adults with special needs.
There are still gaps in the history of this land, such as who owned the land before Dr. C. C. Hart. If research uncovers more history of this land, you will find it here in a future blog.