Melissa Swindell, historian on the Friends of Lost Corner Board of Directors, shared the unique story of the city’s neighborhood nature preserve with Sandy Springs residents at the park’s main cottage on March 10.
Lost Corner Preserve is a 24-acre passive park with nature trails, a community garden, and a restored cottage at 7300 Brandon Mill Road. It’s in west-central Sandy Springs near Riverside Drive and the Chattahoochee River.
The Friends of Lost Corner, a nonprofit that manages the park’s community garden, invited Swindell to kick off its spring programming with a 200-year-old history lesson.
Swindell is a former historic resources and education director at Heritage Sandy Springs, one of the community’s pre-incorporation nonprofits that dissolved amid the pandemic in 2021. She is now the executive director of the Georgia Writers Museum in Eatonton.
The Friends of Lost Corner Preserve has six lectures at the cottage scheduled through the end of April, including programs about garden butterflies, native plants, and fireflies. There’s also a monthly book club and a native plant sale on April 11.
Thanks to Margaret “Peggy” Miles, her family’s oasis in central Sandy Springs is available to the public all week during daylight hours. Peggy was born in the Lost Corner cottage in 1922 and passed away there in 2008.
How Lost Corner got its name
The Miles family purchased what is now Lost Corner Preserve at the corner of Brandon Mill and Dalrymple roads in 1913.
Peggy’s father, Fred Miles, worked for Atlanta Gas and Electric, selling hydroelectric power from the Morgan Falls Dam, constructed in 1904 for Atlanta’s streetcars.
Some attendees asked whether the architecture matched Glenridge Hall, demolished in 2015 to make way for the new Mercedes-Benz USA headquarters and Aria development.
Swindell said Fred Miles constructed the cottage that stands today in the late 1910s. A second phase added the main hall by 1925, with newspaper used as insulation in the walls and ceiling. Visitors can still see some newspaper clippings in the chimney.
The Miles family had five children, including Peggy, who all attended a two-room schoolhouse on Morgan Falls Road before heading to college. Peggy and two of her siblings graduated from North Fulton High School, which merged with Northside to form North Atlanta.
“They walked two miles each way,” Swindell said. “On weekends, the family attended church and picnics at Sandy Springs United Methodist Church and the campgrounds located across from the present-day church site on Sandy Springs Circle.”
Swindell said the Miles family sold parts of their land in what was essentially rural Georgia at the time to finance their children’s college tuition.
“The story goes that [the name was derived] because none of their friends or family from Atlanta could figure out how to get out here to the property at that time,” Swindell said. “So, it was in a lost corner.”
From Oak Grove to Sandy Springs
More than 60 years before the Miles family bought the property, the first documented residents of Lost Corner were the McMurtrey family. The couple moved from east Cobb County across the Chattahoochee River to what is now western Sandy Springs sometime in the late 1840s.
“It was recorded in 1851 that there was a witness to this deed for the new community church, a man named William McMurtrey,” Swindell said. “So how did he end up coming from Cobb County here? We think the most likely answer is that he was the first school teacher in Sandy Springs.”
The earliest property deed in 1861 shows the land belonging to Levy Wilson, who also owned property nearby and eventually married the McMurtrey’s daughter, Rebecca, in 1858.
In 1850, the area that is now the city of Sandy Springs was called Oak Grove.
Swindell said there’s speculation that the city got its name from a large number of people who moved to the area from a town called Sandy Springs outside of Anderson, South Carolina, including Mary Catherine McMurtrey, William’s wife.
The McMurtrey family never owned the Lost Corner property, stretching more than 100 acres to the Chattahoochee River at its peak. Instead, they rented from successive landlords until the early 1900s.
“The lives of William and Mary Catherine ended prematurely from illness in 1857,” Swindell said. “They died within two days of each other, and are both buried at the Sandy Springs Methodist Church in the historic part of the church cemetery.”
In fact, they have the two oldest marked graves.
James Addison McMurtrey, their son, lived on the property until 1901. He is buried on the property with his wife. For three years, his daughter Lucinda McMurtrey lived with the Miles family at Lost Corner before relocating to Atlanta.
Legacy of Lost Corner in Sandy Springs
Some attendees of “The History of Lost Corner” lecture are longtime Sandy Springs residents who knew Peggy Miles or the descendants of other early settler families.
Peggy Miles worked at Emory University as a histologist, or someone who studies and works with biological tissue. Just before Miles died, she worked with neighbors Tricia Thompson Fox and Cheryl Barlow to turn the property into a city park.
“She never married, nor had any children,” Swindell said. “She loved Lost Corners dearly and wanted to protect it for future generations.”
Miles saw the city of Sandy Springs develop from a rural town to a city in the heart of metro Atlanta. There are now sidewalks from her family’s old cottage to city hall along what used to be dirt roads.
In 1994, Wesleyan School tried to acquire the property from Miles so it could construct its private K-12 Christian School, which is now in Peachtree Corners.
“Originally, Wesleyan was a preschool founded at the Sandy Springs United Methodist Church,” Swindell said. “Concerned neighbors rallied together and formed a neighborhood association to petition the Atlanta Regional Commission and Fulton County against the rezoning for this area.”
A little more than two decades later, Miles was able to place a deed restriction and work with the Trust for Public Land to keep the remaining 24 acres of her family’s land preserved for the community.
“Sadly, however, within a year of this purchase, she passed away,” Swindell said. “She left funding both to both her beloved church, Dunwoody United Methodist, and the Sandy Springs Conservancy. The remaining overage from funding was held with the Trust for Public Land, and it was dedicated to building the trails around Lost Corner Preserve.”