The land on which Andalusia was first built had in the mid-19th century been a working
plantation of between 1,500 and 1,700 acres owned and operated by Joseph and Mary "Polly" Stovall. The plantation was worked by no less than 39 enslaved people owned by Stovall. After Polly Stovall's death, the estate was purchased at a public auction by sometime mayor of Milledgeville, Nathan Hawkins, and later sold to Col. Thomas Johnson of Kentucky in 1870. There, she finished her manuscript for her novel
Wise Blood and, with her health improving, she moved with her mother to Andalusia, then still a working farm. She had visited the home every summer in her childhood. Her mother had jointly inherited the 544-acre property along with her brother Louis Cline from their uncle. O'Connor saw her time at Andalusia as a temporary place to restore her health, not as a permanent home, though her health still fluctuated. As she wrote to editor
Robert Giroux, "I am up and around again now but won't be well enough to go back to Connecticut for some time." She hosted several visitors, including Jesuit priest Fr. James McCown, who became a close friend and spiritual mentor, and writer
Katherine Anne Porter. Even so, she sometimes felt isolated from the active literary culture which she hoped to join and lamented the boredom of her life at the farm: "This season we have had three peachickens hatch and have killed one rattlesnake. Otherwise nothing goes on around here." Nevertheless, she found her experience there was an influence on her writing. The bulk of her life's work was written there and several of her short stories are set in the area, including "
The Displaced Person", which scholars identify as the one which closest resembles the farm. She died in the hospital in nearby Milledgeville in August, 1964. ==Modern history==