The House
Mimosa Hall was first built in 1841 for John Dunwody (1786-1858), a planter from coastal Georgia. A devastating chimney fire the same year caused the wooden walls to burn down. The house was rebuilt with brick walls and completed by 1846. Dunwody was a shareholder in the Roswell Manufacturing Company and a devoted member of the Roswell Presbyterian Church. John and his wife, Jane Bulloch, raised five sons and a daughter in the house. The town of Dunwoody, Georgia, was named after this family. The Dunwody family also enslaved at least thirty individuals while they were living at Mimosa Hall.
In 1869, General A.J. Hansell (1815-1888), the new manager of the Roswell Manufacturing Company, purchased the house and property. He and his wife, Caroline Shepherd, had six children, all of whom were grown by the time the Hansells moved into Mimosa Hall.
After Caroline Hansell died, her son, William, put the house up for auction. The lucky bidder was Ada King (c.1856-1932), a recently widowed in-law of the King family that owned the Roswell Manufacturing Company. King, an active member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, lived in the house from 1899 until 1918, when she sold it to Atlanta architect Joseph Neel Reid (1885-1926).
Reid made substantial changes to the interior of the house and especially to the grounds. After he died, his mother and sister continued to live in the house and operated a tea room there. They sold the house to cotton merchant Gus Tolson (1894-1972) in 1937.
Tolson was the president of the New York Cotton Exchange and he lived in New York City. He used Mimosa Hall as a summer house, although his mother, Jeanne, lived in the house year-round. In 1947, Jeanne moved back to her native Louisiana and Gus sold the house to Atlanta lawyer Granger Hansell (1901-1968), great-grandson of General A. J. Hansell.
Granger Hansell and his wife, Sarah Belle Brodnax, hired an interior designer to furnish the house with period antiques that complemented the breezy, high-ceiling rooms. Sarah Belle was the first female bank director in Georgia.
The Hansells’ son, Ned, a lawyer, moved into the house with his wife, Sylvia, and their two daughters in 1968. Sylvia chartered the North Fulton Child Development Association Inc., in 1970. She helped raise $1 million to build a community center for local impoverished children.
Sally, the sixth generation of the Hansell family to reside in the house, inherited Mimosa Hall from her parents in 2012. In August 2017, she sold the house, as well as much of its historic furniture, to the City of Roswell.
The Grounds
The Cherokee nation lived in the Roswell area until 1838. In May 1830, Georgia passed the Indian Removal Act which exchanged the Cherokee’s North Georgia land with a territory west of Mississippi. In 1831, surveyors began dividing North Georgia into lots which were awarded to prospective settlers via a land lottery. The Treaty of New Echota in 1836 ordered the Cherokee to leave the region within two years; in 1838, the government sent militia to forcefully remove 17, 000 Cherokee from the land.
Roswell and Barrington King, prospectors from coastal Georgia, purchased much of the land in what is now North Fulton County. They gave a ten-acre house lot to John Dunwody in 1838 as an incentive to build a house and settle in the new town of Roswell.
In addition to having Mimosa Hall built, John Dunwody had at least four slave quarters built on the property to house the thirty enslaved persons working in Mimosa Hall.
Neel Reid had the greatest impact on the property, as he redesigned the grounds. He converted the area around the house into fifteen separate garden areas. Reid designed a sunken garden, a reflecting pool with surrounding garden, a weeping tree garden, a rose garden, and a cutting garden.