Bonar Hall is an 1839–40 Georgian-style house in Madison, Georgia, one of the first of the grand-style homes built during the town's cotton-boom heyday, 1840–60.

The two-story brick townhouse was built by John Byne Walker, an early Morgan county pioneer, and his heiress bride, Eliza Fannin, half-sister of a war hero, James W. Fannin, Jr., the famous commander at the Goliad Massacre during the Texas Revolution after whom counties in Georgia[2] and Texas[3] are named.

Her family had come down from Virginia to Greene County at the end of the 18th century, claiming the land granted to her great-great-grandfather, Douglas Watson, for his services in the American Revolutionary War.

She was a relative of Eliza Fannin, Douglas Watson's great granddaughter, and had previously been living for by past 14 years at the nearby Carter-Newton House on Academy Street, where her children grew up.

In 1968, he was elected posthumously to the Georgia Newspaper Hall of Fame,[15] and his portrait-like photograph hangs at the UGA's Grady College of Journalism next to Ralph McGill, his political opposite.

Miss Josie's daughter, Therese Newton, inherited the house and was one of the closest friends of the popular globe-trotting adventurer, Robert L. Ripley, visiting him frequently at his 28-room Long Island mansion until his sudden death in 1949.