The "Meadows cabin" is a "Grantville monument," David A. Wilson says, and he will fight any attempt to move it to Newnan.

"A few years back there was talk about moving this cabin to Newnan," Wilson says, "but I would really fight against that. It's a Grantville monument, and it's in a good setting."

The Coweta County Commission recently approved some repairs, including roofing, for the 170-year-old structure, one of the oldest in the county. The Meadows cabin was built in 1828 by Wilson's great-great-grandfather, John Coggins Meadows, about 10 years before he married Julia Ann Cook. The couple lived in the cabin until the 1860s; they had 10 children including Rebecca Meadows Smith, Wilson's great-grandmother.

The cabin was moved from north Grantville to its home near a Little League field in the downtown area in the 1970s, Wilson noted, because it was in danger of destruction for the building of Interstate 85. The late Weyman Evans persuaded the county to purchase and move the cabin, and it's now under the jurisdiction of the recreation department.

Wilson says there's another "artifact" that goes with the cabin, a Civil War cannonball that rolled off a supply train traveling slowly through Grantville. Some of the Meadows children managed to get the 135-pound iron ball home, Wilson said, "and it stayed in the front yard until the cabin was moved, then I took it to my house," an 1861 structure where he lives with his mother, Emily Gene Smith Wilson.