Andalusia's restored water tower (left) and the more recently restored pump house.  Photo courtesy of Craig R. Amason, Executive Director, Flannery O'Connor - Andalusia Foundation.

In SFY 2004, Andalusia, located in Milledgeville, received $20,100 for complete rehabilitation of the water tower located behind the main house on the 544-acre estate.  Consisting of 14 structures, the farm complex was home to Georgia writer Flannery O'Connor and serves as a backdrop to many of her published letters.  In her short story A Circle in the Fire, O'Connor makes a specific reference to a white water tower, thus making the water tower (above) at Andalusia an important element in the interpretation of the site.  Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah in 1925 but moved to Milledgeville in 1940 with her parents.  After receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree from the State University of Iowa, Flannery returned to Milledgeville in 1951 and moved to the family farm, Andalusia, to battle lupus and work on her writing.  O'Connor's works include the 1952 novel Wise Blood and the highly acclaimed collection of short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find.  O'Connor was posthumously awarded the 1971 National Book Award for Fiction for The Complete Stories. Other honors include the National Book Critics Award for The Habit of Being, and in 1988, O'Connor's collected works were published as part of the Library of America series, a collection of America's best authors. 

For the SFY 1996 round of grants, the Cora Harris Study, located in Bartow County, was awarded $900 to repair the roof of the building after a tree branch fell during a tornado.  Cora Harris was born in Elbert County in 1869.  She married Lundy Harris, a Methodist minister who traveled for many years before teaching at Oxford College.  Cora Harriss life was filled with the tragedies of two children dying young and her husband's emotional problems, which ultimately led to his suicide in 1910. In 1913 she purchased approximately 200 acres in rural Bartow County to develop a retreat. There, in 1915, she built a log building for her study. After the death of her husband, Cora wrote 14 novels including The Circuit Riders Wife.  Many of her publications were published serially in Ladies Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post, and she had a regular column in the Atlanta Journal.  She was recognized posthumously as a Georgia Woman of Achievement in 1996.