On Dec. 4, 1949, the Atlanta Journal Magazine published a photograph of Tech president Blake Van Leer and his wife, Ella, seated on either side of a picture window in their new home, called “an interesting study in traditional architecture adapted to modern needs.”
Sixty years later, the current occupants of the president’s residence, G. P. “Bud” Peterson and his wife, Val, recreated the serene scene of Georgia Tech’s first couple enjoying a few quiet moments of down time.
In actuality, President Peterson burst into the home in between meetings at his Carnegie Building office on campus, about a 15-minute walk from the residence, which is protected from 10th Street by a stone wall and curving driveway on a slope and surrounded by Tech’s tennis courts, track and family housing.
Ella Van Leer is credited with planning the structure, designed by the architectural firm Toombs & Creighton. The house was constructed with a $100,000 gift from an anonymous Georgia Tech alumnus.
“Other alumni and the faculty made handsome contributions, such as building two porticos and donating linen, china and trees and shrubbery for the lawn,” the Atlanta Journal Magazine reported.
The south portico looked out across Rose Bowl Field and the skyline of Atlanta. Ella Van Leer is said to have admired the view so much that she painted it on the wall of the basement game room. Today, the Petersons watch television in the lower-level family room, where the president’s woodworking skills are evident through an entertainment center, shelves and a dollhouse he built. Ella Van Leer’s handiwork evidently was painted over long before the Petersons moved in.
Groundbreaking for the home took place May 22, 1948, with an invocation, greeting by Georgia Tech Alumni Foundation president Cherry L. Emerson, an oral history of the site presented by Ella Van Leer, displays of the architectural renderings and finally the groundbreaking itself led by Fuller E. Callaway. A luncheon at the building site concluded the festivities.
Inside the program was a history of “a site gifted by nature with beauty and soft breezes and endowed by mankind with historical and legendary tales.”
When the house was featured again, this time in the Sept. 15, 1974, Sunday edition of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution with Joseph and Florence Pettit in residence, the article reported that the president’s home was located on the “highest spot on the Tech campus. It was in the days of the Old South that Solomon Landis, a designer and builder of many of the antebellum homes in Atlanta, chose this spot to build his own home and to create beautiful gardens, of which traces still remain.”
Written more than a hundred years after the end of the Civil War, the article also said, “During the War Between the States, a handful of brave Confederate sharpshooters used the house as an outpost and held off the Yankee invaders. But the house was captured, torn down and the lumber used by the Federal troops to build a hospital just north of the site. Solomon Landis returned during Reconstruction days and built a second house for his family. It burned down in 1898.”
Ella Van Leer wrote a Gone With the Wind-like version for the September-October 1948 edition of the Georgia Tech Alumnus.
“As the Federal forces neared Atlanta, one night ‘Honest Jack’ Jones, state treasurer, came with several men on horseback to this home of S. Landis, whose good wife told of her fright, watching the men get picks and shovels from the barn and with lanterns go off with her husband; and how relieved she was on his safe return,” she wrote. “He never would divulge his secret. However, for years and even within the memory of his grandchildren, men have dug for hidden treasure, especially among the roots of a fine tulip tree which grew by Tanyard Creek on what is now the Rose Bowl Stadium. Even as far as the present, O’Keefe School people could be seen searching for the phantom gold.”
Today, Val Peterson is focusing on old gold and white. Although she has done no redecorating since moving in, she says any changes that are made, particularly to aging draperies, will respect Tech’s colors.
When the Van Leers became the first residents in 1949, the Atlanta Journal Magazine society editor said the “prevailing color of the decorative theme is aqua. It is found in the monotone carpeting of the hallways and stairs, in much of the woodwork and the walls downstairs. The foyer is papered in an interesting documentary print on an aqua background. The paper was printed on the original presses used just after the Revolution to issue grants to Gen. Nathaniel Greene and Gen. Anthony Wayne, the latter having been, appropriately enough, among Col. Van Leer’s forebears.”
The aqua theme is a faded memory, as is the foyer wallpaper, replaced by a mural of the Georgia Tech campus commissioned by President Wayne and Anne Clough.
In a documentary for the Alumni Association’s Living History program, then-President Clough said the mural took nearly a year to complete and is meant to depict the Georgia Tech campus of about 1915. The inclusion of Kennesaw Mountain as well as a monument to George P. Burdell were what Clough called examples of “artistic license.”
In 1949, the home was described as “majestic in proportion and classic in design. Its rooms are spacious and stately, planned especially for entertaining. Yet it is homelike and livable, an effect achieved by the use of family portraits, objects of art and antiques collected by the Van Leers and by such personal touches as the yellow jackets Mrs. Van Leer herself painted in gold on the white walls of the powder room — just for the sake of Tech tradition.”
Alas, Ella Van Leer’s yellow jackets are gone, but the home remains the site of stately gatherings and livable accommodations for the Petersons. This fall, the first family hosted 120 guests for Legislative Day, a party that included Gov. Sonny Perdue and Georgia lawmakers, and 70 people for a pregame gathering of members of the Board of Regents and their families.
A surprise party took place Oct. 17, when hundreds of Georgia Tech students descended on the president’s residence with a goalpost after the Yellow Jackets’ win over Virginia Tech.
Peterson is interviewed after students arrived at the residence with a goalpost from the stadium to celebrate the Homecoming victory.
The Petersons were making their way home after the Homecoming game when they saw the goalpost being carried down the street.
“We’re running up the driveway, and I said, ‘I think you need to speak to them, Bud.’ We came in and he got two kitchen chairs and he put them right in front of the door and we climbed up on them,” Val Peterson said.
She praised the behavior of the students.
“The police said, ‘Move back, move back.’ They moved back. Then they were going, ‘Speech, speech,’” she said, mimicking how the president put a finger to his lips to quiet the students. “And they hushed.”
A reporter and cameraman from an Atlanta television station captured the Petersons surrounded by cheering students. Even after they went inside, Val Peterson continued to watch the festivities from the window of her sewing room.
“It was a great party,” she said.
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