Male Academy, Newnan

Photo: Blastoids, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Male Academy at the corner of College Street and Temple Avenue is one of Newnan’s oldest school buildings. For decades the Newnan-Coweta Historical Society ran it as the Male Academy Museum. The building now houses the ChildrenConnect Museum, a hands-on museum for young children, and the society’s history collections are shown at its main museum downtown, the McRitchie-Hollis Museum.

• Address30 Temple Ave., Newnan, GA 30263
• TodayChildrenConnect Museum (hands-on play for young kids)
• History museumMcRitchie-Hollis Museum, 74 Jackson St.
• Historical Society770-251-0207

A Boys’ School From the 1840s

Newnan’s Male Academy, also called the Male Seminary, was a private school for boys founded around 1840, in the years when Newnan was becoming a college town. Down the street, College Temple, one of the early colleges for women in the South, operated from 1854 to 1888. After the school closed, the frame building stood empty for years until local preservationists recognized it and the historical society restored it as a museum.

As a museum it showed a restored 1800s classroom with the teacher’s original desk, the Smith family’s decorative arts brought by wagon from Virginia in 1828, Civil War relics from Newnan’s years as a Confederate hospital town and the Battle of Brown’s Mill, a costume and textile collection, and displays on local notables such as country singer Alan Jackson. Those collections belong to the Newnan-Coweta Historical Society.

Visiting Today

Male AcademyEarlier photo

More in Coweta County: Presidential Pathways museums and the Presidential Pathways travel region.