The W.N. Ware House (circa 1876)

2690 Mt. Vernon Road, Dunwoody, GA (located in the SE corner of the parking lot of Life Center Family Church)

This home is located on the grounds of the Life Center Family Church. It originally faced Mt. Vernon Road, but was moved by the church to its current more secluded spot away from the road, where it serves as a film studio for the church.

The house was built in 1876 by John Ware, a dairy farmer from Newton County, Georgia. With roots in England and Ireland, the Wares arrived in America in the 1600s and settled in Virginia.

John Ware’s home was built on 170 acres of farm land, which extended to the Chattahoochee River and included land where the Orchard Park Shopping Center stands today. His son, William Newton Ware, Sr., was born in the house in 1877. He married Ella Warnock, another Dunwoody native whose family also owned a house on Mt. Vernon Road that is still standing today (The Warnock Cottage). They had a son, William Ware, Jr., who grew up in the house and attended school in Dunwoody.

The Ware family was greatly affected by the Depression and had to leave the farm despite William’s best efforts to retain it. At one point, William operated a still in the area where the Brooke Farm subdivision stands today, but that was not enough to save their land, and they sold it and moved to the Kirkwood area of Atlanta.

Meanwhile, in the early 1930s, the Macmillan Publishing Company had sent Norm Berg to Atlanta to cultivate Southern writers. Initially living in Midtown, the Bergs, wanting a quiet rural life with space for Berg’s hunting dogs, bought the Wares’ dairy farm in 1938, named it Sellenraa, turned the old barn into their home and used the farmer’s cottage, called “the little house” by the Berg family, as a guest house and sanctuary for writers.

Among the great novelists who lived in the cottage now known as the Ware House were Pulitzer Prize winner Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, best known for The Yearling, and Pat Conroy, who wrote most of his masterpiece The Great Santini while living there.

When Berg died in 1977, the Berg family retained the farm.

His son, Norman Sean Berg, Jr., known as Sean, lived in the main house until deciding to sell because Dunwoody was losing its rural charm. After selling most of the farm to developers of what would become Orchard Park shopping center and several housing subdivisions, he sold the remaining five acres to the founders of what would become the Life Center Family Church.

The church started in 1987, built its current building in 1996 and in 1997 razed the old barn and moved the cottage to the back of the property. The green well house near the road marks the cottage’s original location.