Downtown Milledgeville's Old Landmarks Are Back in Local Hands

"My brother owned this building back in the day when the restaurant was known as The Brick," Doug Pendergast told The Union-Recorder this summer, sitting in a booth at Buffington's. "It was the original location of The Brick, and then they turned it into Buffington's."

That building at 120 West Hancock Street is back with the people who started it. A few blocks east, another local family plans to keep a feed store's silo and counter standing and build a hotel next to them. The two projects are very different in size, but they follow the same pattern. The money behind downtown's next chapter comes from people with personal ties to these buildings, and both projects are designed around what's already there.

A Small Leak, a Whole New Roof

Doug and Frank Pendergast co-own Buffington's along with a large group of others. One of their partners is G.W. Brooks, son of Mitch Brooks, who was Frank's original partner in the business. Doug said G.W.'s sister Savannah Wellman, G.W.'s wife Montana Brooks, Doug's niece Morgan Pendergast and her partner Kellen Wynn are all investors as well.

The group bought the building last fall and planned a fairly simple handoff. Then the building had other ideas. "We discovered that a small water leak was actually a major structural problem with the roof," Doug said, "so we closed it for everyone's safety and got a brand spanking new roof." The months it stayed closed also paid for renovated bathrooms and a completely remodeled kitchen.

Very little of that work shows from the dining room, and the owners wanted it that way. They set out to keep the character of the old tavern. Work by local artists hangs on the walls, and the two big front windows still swing wide open to bring in outside air. Pieces from the Pendergast family's own collection hang there too, some of them kept for years.

The Milledgeville-Baldwin County Chamber of Commerce hosted the ribbon cutting at a Friday morning grand reopening in August. It drew business owners, regulars and students. The week before, five GCSU students spent the whole night on a bench out front for a shot at free burgers in an opening promotion.

The ownership structure is the part with the longest reach. Doug told the paper exactly what the younger investors are meant to become:

"All of these other investors, those are our next set of leaders of the company. They're not just employees; they're actually co-owners of this business."

That puts a second generation of owners in the room, people with a financial reason to keep the tavern running well past this reopening. Doug said Frank had wanted the business back in the family for a long time, "because this was the original place where he and his partner got started." The Brick still operates today at 136 West Hancock, on the same block where it got its start.

The Feed Store That Would Become a Meeting Hall

The same instinct shows up on a much larger scale at the old Duckworth Feed and Mill Store on Elbert Street, which the Harrington family ran before Joe Duckworth. Gus Pursley and Duckworth had talked for years. Pursley hates to see historic buildings torn down, so he told Duckworth to let him know whenever he was ready to leave the feed business. One day Duckworth said, "Gus, I'm ready."

The first idea was to restore the building and open a restaurant or bar. Then came conversations with the Milledgeville Convention & Visitors Bureau, officials at GMC and Georgia College, and other townspeople, and they all landed on the same need, a downtown hotel. In June, Pursley said the group had closed on additional parcels that reach through to Jefferson Street. Those purchases give his group the largest tract of property in downtown.

Under the plan described in June, the old feed store stays and gets a new job. Here's what the June column described:

• A 120-room hotel affiliated with Hilton, with the specific Hilton brand still undecided
• The Duckworth building converted into a conference center, with a main room seating more than 300 and a section under the old wooden beams divided into smaller meeting rooms
• The old silo and the store counter kept in place
• A ground-floor coffee shop and kitchen, plus a rooftop bar looking south toward GMC and west toward Georgia College and downtown
• The adjacent Thompson House likely used for suites suited to wedding groups, after early talk of making it a restaurant

The seating number matters because of what it's measured against. Pursley said the biggest conference space in Milledgeville now is Georgia College's Magnolia Center, which seats about 150. A room for more than 300 would roughly double the size of gathering the town can host under one roof, and it would sit inside a building that once sold feed.

The design came from Lord Aeck Sargent. McKenzie Davenport, Pursley's son-in-law, said Tony Aeck of that firm has worked with Georgia College and GMC on the Governor's Mansion and the Old Capital. Davenport said he prefers a graduate-level brand of the kind Hilton aims at college towns. He compared it to the Hilton at Auburn University: "Here, we want people to know they're in Milledgeville, Georgia."

Davenport is also CFO of Fowler Flemister, and he was open about how far outside its normal work the family has gone. "We're not in the hotel business; we're in the concrete business," he said. "This hasn't been about the money at all. This has been about giving back to the community. And it's about hanging onto the history of Mr. Joe (Duckworth's) building."

Where the hotel plan stands

The project has cleared some hurdles and still faces others. This spring, Milledgeville City Council approved the project's related rezoning and special-use requests after the Planning & Zoning and Historic Preservation reviews. Design review and building permits still come after those approvals. Davenport told the Baldwin County Progressive Farmers Club in June that construction could start as early as this fall. With about two years of construction, the hotel could start taking bookings for November 2028. In that June report, the group was still waiting on final construction cost estimates and looking for more investors. No groundbreaking has been reported since. Georgia College president Cathy Cox has reportedly told parents at freshman orientation that a downtown hotel will be open by the time their students graduate.

Where These Buildings Show Up on the Fall Calendar

Both projects are betting on downtown evenings that fill Hancock Street. This fall's schedule puts several of those evenings within a few doors of Buffington's and The Brick.

The Oct. 2 First Friday takes place on the very block where Buffington's and The Brick both stand. That makes it the first big downtown night since the reopening to bring a street crowd right past the new roof and the open front windows.

Deep Roots weekend runs Friday, Oct. 16 through Sunday, Oct. 18. Visit Milledgeville's guide lists Clayton Nile Young, The Psycodelics, Sweet Tea Pedigree, The BlaqBerry Band and Tropical Breeze Steel Band among the performers. On the festival Saturday, Georgia College's alumni office has a tent on the Old Courthouse Lawn, and its Honors College alumni mixer is at The Brick. If you're waiting on a fall homecoming, Georgia College lists its next Homecoming & Alumni Weekend for Feb. 19 and 20, 2027.

Duckworth's silo will still be standing on Elbert Street for all of these dates, and it would remain standing if the plan goes forward. The plan keeps it as part of the complex, so the next time the town has a gathering too big for the Magnolia Center, people could meet in the old feed store.

If you own an older building downtown or nearby and are weighing what to keep, what to fix and what it's worth to the next owner, we'd be glad to walk through it with you. Kyle and The Hitchcock Team have spent years helping Milledgeville families through decisions about property that carries a family's history, and that first conversation is always an easy one.