Part 2: A Love Lost and a Life Lived

Researched and Contributed by Callie McGinnis, Assistant Director, Historic Linwood Foundation

Photos Include: 1. Gravesite of Julia Flournoy, Peyton Colquitt and their stillborn child. Headshot of Julia Flournoy; 2. Headshot of Peyton Holt Colquitt; 3. The Dinglewood Mansion
Gravesite Location: The grave is on Alder. Go west on Center, turn left on Alder and it is the first wrought iron fenced plot on the right.

The beautiful love story, however, ended tragically when Peyton was killed in the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863.  Julia returned to Columbus to live with her parents. Then after the war, after her father had died, she and her mother took off for Paris, where the beautiful Julia was involved in a romance with the great nephew of Napoleon I.  He doted on her and gave her fabulous gifts of jewelry. However, something went awry, and Julia and her mother came home. 

A few years later, in 1868, Julia married one of the wealthiest landowners in Georgia: a man named Leonidas  “Lee” Jordan, from Macon, who was 14 years her senior.  Lee lavished Julia with everything she needed or wanted. He was in the process of building her a grand mansion on Atlanta’s Peachtree Street, when, in 1891, she suddenly died.  He only lived in the house for a year before selling it around 1902 for $65,000.

Julia died December 30, 1891, at Dinglewood on a trip to see her mother. She is buried in Linwood Cemetery near her first husband Peyton Colquitt.  Their stillborn only child is buried there also.

Incidentally, Lee Jordan went on to marry again.  In 1894 he wed Ilah Dunlap who was his junior by forty-six years.  He died in 1899, and the twenty-six-year-old Ilah went on to marry Columbus native John D. Little, a prominent Atlanta attorney in 1906.  Little died in 1934, and afterwards, Ilah, with her inheritance from both husbands, spent most of her time traveling.  She died in Germany in 1939, and a large chunk of her estate was bequeathed to the University of Georgia to build a new main library: the Ilah Dunlap Little Memorial Library.

The love story of Julia and Peyton remains a beloved part of Columbus's history, a tale of passion, loss, and enduring memories.

Sources:

Thomas, Kenneth H., “Dinglewood: A History and Some New Information,” Muscogiana, Vol. 33, N0.2 (Fall 2022), pp. 1-17.

Williford, William Bailey, Peachtree Street, Atlanta (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1962), pp. 66-67,

Worsley, Etta Blanchard, “A Bonaparte Romance with a Georgia Belle, The Georgia Review,  Vol. 8, No. 2 (Summer 1954), pp. 218-227.
________, “Dinglewood,” in Columbus on the Chattahoochee (Columbus, GA: Columbus Office Supply Company, 1951), pp. 221-223.