Dell-Goodall House, Sylvania

Photo: Jud McCranie, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

About 5½ miles north of Sylvania on U.S. 301 stands the only building left of Jacksonborough, Screven County’s first county seat. Legend says it survived because a traveling preacher cursed the rest of the town and spared this house. Built in 1815 for Seaborn Goodall, it is now owned by the Brier Creek Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

• Built1815, Plantation Plain style
• LocationU.S. 301, about 5.5 miles north of Sylvania
• OwnerBrier Creek Chapter, NSDAR
• National RegisterListed October 17, 1977

Lorenzo Dow’s Curse

Seaborn Goodall, son of Revolutionary War soldier Pleasant Goodall, was a mason, a Methodist pioneer and clerk of the Superior Court from 1816 to 1836. Jacksonborough, the county seat from 1795 to 1847, had a rough reputation. Around 1820, the story goes, a gang of town “rowdies” ran off Lorenzo Dow, a famous itinerant Methodist preacher. Goodall rescued him and gave him a bed for the night. The next morning Dow stopped on the bridge out of town and asked God to curse Jacksonborough, sparing only the Goodall house.

Within 20 years the town was all but gone. People told of unexplained fires, sudden winds that tore off roofs, and flash floods from the usually quiet creek. With the town nearly deserted, the county seat moved to Sylvania in 1847, and the Goodall house was left standing alone.

The House

The sturdy frame house was built of hand-hewn Georgia pine with matched joints and hand-whittled wooden pegs, timber that has long since cured to near rock-hardness. It sits at the end of a long avenue of moss-draped trees. Local tradition holds that General Sherman’s troops camped here during the March to the Sea. After 1870 the house belonged to the family of Dr. Julian P. Dell of Savannah, a retired Methodist minister, and it has been called the Dell-Goodall House ever since. The Brier Creek Chapter of the DAR restored it and still cares for it.

Visiting

The house is fenced, and we could not find regular public hours. The Brier Creek Chapter opens it for tours during special events. On June 20, 2026, for example, the chapter hosted a free America 250 celebration with tours from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and an actor portraying Lorenzo Dow. You can see the house from the road at other times. For upcoming open days, check the DAR’s page for the house or call the Screven County Chamber of Commerce at 912-564-7878.

More in the area: historic sites around Sylvania and Magnolia Springs State Park in nearby Millen.