The land has its own long history. In the mid-nineteenth century, the property was a working plantation of between 1,500 and 1,700 acres, owned by Joseph and Mary "Polly" Stovall and worked by at least 39 enslaved people. After Polly Stovall's death, the estate passed through a public auction to Nathan Hawkins, a sometime mayor of Milledgeville, and was later sold to Colonel Thomas Johnson of Kentucky in 1870. By the time O'Connor's mother, Regina Cline O'Connor, inherited the 544-acre property along with her brother Louis Cline from their uncle, Andalusia was still a working farm -- dairy cows, crops, hired hands. O'Connor had visited every summer as a child, and the rhythms of that rural Georgia world -- its class tensions, its grotesque humor, its hard-shell religious conviction -- seeped into her bones long before she put them on paper.

O'Connor arrived at Andalusia not by choice but by necessity. In 1950, while living in Connecticut and working on her first novel, she collapsed on a train home for Christmas. Diagnosed with lupus -- the same autoimmune disease that had killed her father -- she moved to Milledgeville to recover. She finished the manuscript for Wise Blood at Andalusia and, as her health stabilized, settled into a daily routine: morning Mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in town, then writing in her downstairs bedroom until noon, afternoons spent receiving visitors or tending her beloved fowl. She wrote to her editor Robert Giroux, "I am up and around again now but won't be well enough to go back to Connecticut for some time." That temporary arrangement lasted the rest of her life. Visitors came to her instead -- Jesuit priest James McCown, who became a close friend and spiritual mentor, and fellow writer Katherine Anne Porter among them.

The isolation that O'Connor sometimes lamented proved to be the condition her art required. The bulk of her life's work was written at Andalusia -- the collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find, her second novel The Violent Bear It Away, and the posthumous Everything That Rises Must Converge. Several of her stories are set in landscapes clearly drawn from the farm and its surroundings. Scholars identify "The Displaced Person," with its central Georgia dairy farm and its cast of landowners, hired workers, and displaced Europeans, as the story that most closely resembles Andalusia itself. O'Connor's fiction is famous for its unsettling blend of dark comedy and sudden violence, and the quiet rural world of the farm -- where grace and grotesqueness coexist -- gave her the material to explore those collisions again and again. She died in a hospital in nearby Milledgeville in August 1964, at the age of 39.

After O'Connor's death, Andalusia remained in the family but was not open to the public. It is believed that novelist John Kennedy Toole -- whose own posthumous masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces, would not be published until 1980 -- attempted to visit the house shortly before his death in 1969, only to find it closed. The home was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and opened as a museum in 2003, maintained by the Andalusia Foundation. In August 2017, Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville accepted the donation of the property, pledging to restore and preserve the farm. The recognition continued to grow: on February 24, 2022, Andalusia was designated a National Historic Landmark, joining the small number of American writers' homes to receive that distinction. Today the main house, the farm buildings, and the grounds where peacocks still wander stand as a pilgrimage site for readers who know that the quiet of this place belied the fierce intelligence that worked within it.