Cobb County's Oldest Cabin Heads to Tennessee for $340K Rebuild at Hyde Farm

A log cabin that predates Cobb County itself is finally coming back together, piece by piece, at Hyde Farm Park in East Cobb. The Power-Jackson Cabin, believed to date back more than two centuries, is undergoing a roughly $340,000 restoration funded through public and private dollars after years of uncertainty over whether it would survive at all.

According to FOX 5 Atlanta, Cobb County officials approved the restoration funding in 2024 and agreed the year before to repair and preserve the structure, which is intended to safeguard the cabin for future generations. The station reports the project draws on Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax money, and that the Marietta Daily Journal previously reported both the 2023 agreement to restore the cabin and the 2024 SPLOST approval.

That public funding, however, only tells part of the story. Before the county ever committed tax dollars, it was private community donations that saved the cabin in the first place. In August 2024, nonprofit Cobb Landmarks raised $70,000 from local donors to tag, disassemble, and relocate the structure from its original site on Post Oak Tritt Road to Hyde Farm Park, managing the delicate process to keep the building out of the path of private development.

A Near Miss With the Bulldozer

The push to save the cabin began in 2023, when property owner Kenneth B. Clary sought to rezone the 13-acre Post Oak Tritt Road site for a subdivision. The application drew opposition from local preservationists, according to East Cobb News, before Clary withdrew the rezoning bid and agreed to surrender the cabin. By that point, the structure had sat vacant and unmaintained on private land for more than two decades.

Opposition to development on that site was heightened further by historical records suggesting 19th-century graves, including a Power family daughter and two infants, were located on the property, per the same account. Cemetery advocates and county officials reportedly conducted preliminary ground testing to try to locate burial sites, though it remains an open question whether those surveys ever definitively found them.

Tennessee Craftsmen Inspected Every Log

After the cabin's timber components were tagged and taken apart, they were shipped to Tennessee, where historic restoration firm Leatherwood, Inc. conducted log-by-log assessments to repair and replace weathered wood, Cobb Landmarks says. The goal, per the group, was to preserve as much of the early-19th-century material as possible while shoring up what could no longer bear the structure's weight. The logs have since returned to Cobb County for reassembly.

Architectural historians classify the Power-Jackson Cabin as a rare surviving example of single-pen, one-room log architecture with squared-and-notched joinery, a construction style that was standard for pioneer dwellings in antebellum Georgia, according to The Historical Marker Database. A 2009 county historical marker states that pioneer farmer William Power originally acquired the cabin in exchange for a shotgun, after which his daughter Martha Jane and her husband Jeptha C. Jackson settled there in the late 1840s. Martha Jane Jackson reportedly farmed the property after her husband died in 1888 until her own death in 1924.

Testing the Cabin's True Age

To verify claims that the cabin predates Cobb County's 1832 creation and the Cherokee Land Lottery, Cobb Landmarks partnered with the University of West Georgia in March 2024 to run dendrochronology tree-ring analysis on the logs, a method that can date tree growth rings to the exact year timbers were cut. Results from that testing would help settle whether the structure is, in fact, Cobb County's oldest standing structure, a possibility Hoodline first reported when the cabin completed its physical move.

The Cobb County Board of Commissioners formally authorized SPLOST funding for the reconstruction during an April 9, 2024 vote, according to Cobb Landmarks. SPLOST revenue frequently funds park infrastructure and historic preservation projects across the county.

Reuniting Three Pioneer Cabins

Moving the Power-Jackson Cabin to the 42-acre Hyde Farm Park reunites it with two other 1840s log structures built by pioneer relatives James Cooper Power and George Abner Power, according to WSB Radio. That would create a single public site featuring three dwellings built by the same pioneer family, on land the Power family originally settled in the 1830s.

The broader Hyde Farm property carries its own national distinction: the U.S. Department of the Interior listed all 135 acres on the National Register of Historic Places as the Power-Hyde Farm Historic District on August 28, 2024, per Hyde Farm Friends. The designation recognizes the site's rare preserved agricultural landscape along the Chattahoochee River.

Hoodline previously reported on the cabin's relocation in December 2024, when it arrived at Hyde Farm Park, and on the county's roughly $354,000 restoration funding announcement that same month. What remains unresolved, per East Cobb News, is exactly when the rebuilt cabin will be ready for public access, alongside whether the burial sites once feared on the original property were ever conclusively located.