Behind where the Dunwoody Library and Spruill Center for the Arts sit today and bordering along Womack Road was once the home of Cecil and Nan Inglis Ramsey. The address was 1434 Womack Road. When the Ramsey’s lived there it was Dunwoody School, the only school in the community at the time, that bordered their property.
Dunwoody School
They purchased the land from the Cheek family in 1941. In the early 1900s, the Cheek family had a home (which still stands) at the corner of Chamblee Dunwoody Road and Mount Vernon Road. The other Cheek home sat where Panera Bread is today. The Cheek family operated a sawmill, cotton gin, and flour mill on the southeast corner of the intersection.
Cecil Ramsey went to Georgia Tech and worked as a construction engineer. He planned and supervised the construction of his Dunwoody home. The floors were walnut with wood pegs. A lake was dug out on the property and other children would come over to swim. Carlton Renfroe and Keller Henderson Barron grew up nearby and both recall swimming at the Ramsey lake.
The couple’s four sons, Cecil Jr., Robert, John, and Bruce attended Dunwoody School. Nan Ramsey was active in the Dunwoody School PTA. When the boys reached high school age, they attended Marist School in downtown Atlanta.
In the early 1970s, developer and builder Jim Cowart owned the former Ramsey property and applied for a rezoning application. His plan was to build townhouse style condominiums on the property and call the development Wynterhall.
When Cowart applied for zoning for the land, nearby homeowners and the newly formed Dunwoody Homeowner’s Association were strongly opposed to the development. Sixteen hundred signatures were obtained by Dunwoody homeowners and taken to the DeKalb County Courthouse in Decatur. The zoning application was denied.
Around 1977, Cowart developed a neighborhood of single-family homes on this same land and named the streets Chestnut Ridge Drive and Joberry Court. Joberry Court is named for Joberry Cheek. Cowart later developed a neighborhood in another area of Dunwoody and called it Wynterhall.