After Polly Stovall's death, the estate was purchased at a public auction by sometime mayor of Milledgeville, Nathan Hawkins, and later sold to Col. Thomas Johnson of Kentucky in 1870.

She first lived in the family home of her mother, Regina, on Greene Street in Milledgeville, then owned by her uncles Louis and Bernard Cline.

[9] Even so, she sometimes felt isolated from the active literary culture which she hoped to join and lamented the boredom of her life at the farm: "This season we have had three peachickens hatch and have killed one rattlesnake.

The bulk of her life's work was written there and several of her short stories are set in the area, including "The Displaced Person", which scholars identify as the one which closest resembles the farm.

It is believed that novelist John Kennedy Toole attempted to visit the house shortly before his suicide in 1969, though the home was not then open to the public.