This Year's Marietta Pilgrimage Fits on One Street

The house at 453 Church Street sits where a pond used to be. Before Ralph and Lucille Northcutt built their American Foursquare there in 1915, the lot was Freyer's Pond, part of the nearby Ivy Grove estate. The pond had to be drained and filled before anyone could build on it. A few doors down, in 1908, Frank Freyer sold another half-acre lot. A Marietta lumberman bought it, and a post-Victorian mansion went up there around 1910.

Both houses are on the 40th annual Marietta Pilgrimage Christmas Home Tour, which runs December 4 through 6. So are the other three. This year every private home on the tour stands on Church Street in the Church-Cherokee Historic District. Read side by side, the five houses tell one story. The same families, the same land and the same creek turn up from one address to the next, so this year's tour reads as the history of a single block.

Five Addresses Between 297 and 453

The official tour homes page numbers the houses from the top of the street down. Turned around and walked by address, from the low numbers up, they look like this:

1. Dewald-Carpenter-Harpenau House, 297 Church Street, c. 1900. A Craftsman home with heart pine floors, four working fireplaces and stacked fieldstone posts framing a rebuilt front porch. When the kitchen was put back to its original footprint, two original windows turned up hidden inside closets, and both were reinstated.
2. Green-Bailey House, 352 Church Street, 1908. A restored Craftsman bungalow that still has its original rope-and-pulley windows and a clawfoot tub. Its front railings were inspired by nearby Brumby Hall.
3. Fields-Northcutt-Granger House, 366 Church Street, 1892. A Folk Victorian cottage with an asymmetrical layout, a wraparound porch, shingled gables, and its original heart pine floors, windows and siding.
4. Owenby-Harpenau-Crowson House, 401 Church Street, c. 1910. A late post-Victorian mansion that I.A. Hardeman built on the lot Frank Freyer had sold.
5. Northcutt-Whitaker-Gillis House, 453 Church Street, 1915. An American Foursquare with a box shape and a large wraparound porch, built on the old Freyer's Pond site.

The oldest house sits in the middle of the run, and the newest sits at the top. On roughly two decades' worth of addresses you get Folk Victorian, Craftsman, post-Victorian and Foursquare. That is close to the full range of what Marietta built in the years between the 1890s and World War I.

The Same Names, Door After Door

The hyphenated names on each house are ownership histories, and they overlap.

The Northcutts appear twice. Elijah Hiram "Dick" Northcutt owned the E.H. Northcutt Dry Goods store on the Marietta Square, was a local political leader, and patented a vending machine for spools of thread. His family bought the cottage at 366 Church Street in the 1890s. He lived there until 1924, and his wife, Sallie, stayed on until 1949. Ralph Northcutt owned Marietta's first Buick dealership. He and Lucille built 453 Church Street in 1915 after their earlier home on Cherokee Street, next to the Blair House, burned. The family lived there until 1941.

The Harpenau name also appears twice. Michael and Petite Harpenau bought 401 Church Street in 2011, renovated it extensively, and in 2015 sold it to their daughter Kathleen and her husband, Chase Crowson. At 297 Church Street, the tour page credits the Harpenaus with the restoration.

The Freyer land ties together the two biggest lots on the tour. Frank Freyer sold the half acre that became 401 Church Street to W.P. Stephens, owner of Marietta's well-known lumber company, in 1908. Stephens sold it five years later. Isaac A. and Eloise White bought the finished house in 1928 for $7,500. Freyer's Pond, the land that later became 453 Church Street, belonged to Ivy Grove.

The churches around the Square are part of the street's story too. Dr. White, the 1928 buyer at 401, was minister of First Baptist Church of Marietta, and the tour page says he is thought to have performed many weddings at the house. At 352, Miss Lucy Bailey, the resident organist at First Presbyterian Church, lived in the bungalow from 1941 to 1957. Some of the furnishings are borrowed from next door, in a sense. The single-slab dining table at 297 came from the nearby Minchew house.

Sope Creek Runs Behind Two Backyards

The lots tell the next part of the story. Sope Creek runs behind two of the middle houses, and you can only see it from the back of the properties.

At 366 Church Street, the owners who bought the cottage in 2018 and 2019 have done restoration work along Sope Creek in the backyard. Inside, they added broad brick walkways, custom library bookcases, and kitchen and bath renovations built with antique cabinetry. Next door at 352, a 2011 renovation added a sunroom and back deck, and out back a path leads to what the tour page calls a secluded secret garden on the bank of Sope Creek.

Taken with the drained pond at 453, the creek explains how this part of town looks. Water shaped the lots on this end of Church Street long before any house was built on them. The front porches you see from the sidewalk are the newer layer.

Church Street's Turn on a Rotating Route

The Pilgrimage moves around. The organizers describe it as a tour of private homes in the historic districts around the Marietta Square, and they hold it on the first full weekend in December every year. The City of Marietta's 2018 announcement put that year's tour on Church-Cherokee Street. The city's 2017 announcement and Visit Marietta's 2024 listing placed the tour in the Whitlock Avenue area.

The tradition is older than most of the restorations on this year's tour. In a 2020 announcement, the city said the tour had been held every year since 1987 and usually drew 2,500 to 3,000 visitors over two days to six private homes. That year, COVID-19 turned it into a self-guided walk past Church-Cherokee homes, seen from the sidewalk only. The 2026 version is back to full open houses. It has five homes instead of six and runs over three days instead of two, starting with a Friday evening.

Proceeds go to Cobb Landmarks & Historical Society and Visit Marietta.

Getting to Church Street That Weekend

With every house on one street, the logistics are mostly about getting there and not getting in the way of the shuttle. Organizers ask guests to keep the tour streets clear so the shuttles can run their route. Complimentary shuttles leave about every 15 to 20 minutes from Mill Street and the William Root House. Parking is available at the lots off Mill Street and at the Cobb County Parking Deck off Cherokee Street.

The gala requires festive cocktail attire. The ticket page explains that tickets are never mailed. Tickets bought online or by mail are held at the Marietta Welcome Center or the William Root House, and you can pick them up the week of the tour or on the day itself. Tour homes do not sell tickets.

One ticket covers all three days. You can visit the homes in any order but enter each one only once. A few house rules are worth knowing before you go:

• No children under 8.
• No photography inside the homes.
• No food, drinks, strollers, umbrellas or backpacks indoors.
• No restrooms at the tour homes. Use the Welcome Center, the William Root House, or public buildings during operating hours.
• The tour goes on rain or shine, and tickets are not refundable.

The tour is self-guided. Volunteer docents stand inside each house to point out features and history. Docents choose a home and a shift on the volunteer page, get house-specific material to study beforehand, and receive a free tour ticket. If you already know one of these five houses from walking past it, volunteering is a way to learn the rest of its story.

Building the Weekend Around Mill Street

The Mill Street shuttle stop is also where the Saturday market sets up. The Marietta Square Farmers Market runs year-round on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to noon at 41 Mill Street. On December 5, the market and the tour both open at 9 a.m., which makes it easy to shop first and then catch the shuttle up to Church Street.

The second shuttle stop is worth a visit in its own right. The William Root House, at 80 N Marietta Parkway, has had its home and grounds restored to how they looked in 1860. Cobb Landmarks describes it as one of the oldest homes in the Atlanta area, and the museum's interactive displays interpret the lives of the Root family and of the enslaved people who worked in the house. Seeing it before or after Church Street gives the tour an earlier starting point than 1892.

The Earl Smith Strand Theatre has holiday shows on both sides of the tour. It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play opens Friday, November 6, and runs through November 22. A Christmas Tradition, a live musical revue, runs December 11 through 21.

A street of homes like this one, with original heart pine, windows found inside closets and a 1997 rear addition built to fit the old house, is what The Calvert Group pays attention to every day. With Jacob's construction background, we can tell you how a restoration like the ones on Church Street affects a home's value. If you own a historic Marietta home and want to know where it stands this season, start with a free home valuation.