Your gaze lands on the Herndon Home, the Beaux-Arts mansion Alonzo Herndon built in 1910. Herndon was born enslaved in 1858 in Social Circle, Georgia. He arrived in Atlanta after emancipation with almost nothing, trained as a barber, and built a chain of barbershops that catered to Atlanta's white elite — including a flagship shop on Peachtree Street that was by all accounts the finest barbershop in the South.
With the capital from his barbershops, he founded the Atlanta Mutual Insurance Association in 1905, which grew into the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, one of the largest Black-owned financial institutions in American history. Herndon and his wife Adrienne built this fifteen-room Classical Revival house themselves, with Adrienne designing the interiors and much of the decorative program. She died just days after the house was completed, never fully enjoying what she had built.
The house is now a museum and a testament to what was achieved in the teeth of a system designed to make such achievement impossible. The family donated it to the public in 1983.