Circa-1820s Greene County Plantation House, Former B&B
23 Lick Skillet Rd, Greensboro, GA 30642
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
The property is no longer operating as a bed and breakfast. Visible from the road only.
Access
Limited Access
Rural roadside
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1825 · Greene County Plantation Architecture · Liberia Colonization Effort · Early Family Heritage
Early Hill stands on a ridge between Richland and Beaverdam Creek about two miles northwest of Greensboro, Georgia. The plantation was assembled by Joel Early Jr. (1793-1851), who inherited acreage from his father Joel Early Sr., a Revolutionary-era settler in Greene County. Joel Early Jr. began consolidating roughly 1,000 acres in the 1820s; by 1837 the property had grown to 1,800 acres, and by 1850 to about 2,200 acres worked by sixty enslaved people. Cotton was the principal crop.
The house itself is a two-and-one-half-story gabled frame structure with gable returns, transitional in style — Georgian massing with Greek Revival detailing. Architectural surveys date the surviving residence to circa 1825, though Shadowlands and earlier paranormal listings reference a late-1700s construction date and a builder named John Brown that is not supported by Greene County records.
Joel Early Jr. is one of a small number of documented Georgia planters who attempted to manumit enslaved people through transport to Liberia. He began corresponding with the American Colonization Society in 1827 and sent thirty of the people he enslaved to Liberia in 1830. His brother Peter Early served as a Georgia congressman and governor from 1813 to 1815.
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century the house was operated as the Early Hill Bed and Breakfast, with park-like grounds and walking paths. The B&B is no longer in business. The mailing address of record is 23 Lick Skillet Road, Greensboro, GA 30642.
Sources
The lore at Early Hill is concentrated on the front yard and an upper bedroom. Local accounts describe a young girl killed when a tree branch broke beneath her, who has reportedly been seen at night swinging from the tree where she died.
A second motif involves a bedroom mirror upstairs. According to recurring retellings, a guest sitting in front of the mirror may briefly catch the reflection of an older woman, identified in the lore as the girl's mother, brushing the girl's hair before vanishing.
The basement is described in some accounts as the source of rattling sounds, attributed in the original Shadowlands narrative to the plantation's enslaved workforce. Because the source for these accounts is informal, and because the house is now a private residence, no organized paranormal investigation has documented the claims with named witnesses or instrumentation.
A porch motif also recurs: a figure described as an older woman in a rocking chair on the front porch, said to vanish when an observer steps onto the first stair. This account, like the others, exists in regional folk-tale collections and aggregator listings rather than in news archives or historical society records.
Notable Entities
View Early Hill from the public road. The two-and-one-half-story house is set back behind period grounds. The property is no longer a bed and breakfast and appears to be in private hands; do not enter.
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