When Wiley Burge purchased the first 202 acre land lot in 1809, the Native American settlement along the creek was long gone, and Burge began its farming years. The first house on the property is believed to have been built near the aboriginal settlement site by Wiley Burge and was gone by the 1840’s, leaving only the old family graveyard nearby. Wiley’s son Thomas inherited the land from his father, and added significantly to it in the 1830’s, 40’s, and 50’s. In the 1830’s Thomas Burge built a house for his family on the site of the current family home.
In 1848 Thomas Burge’s wife Mary died, leaving him a widower with five children. In 1850 he married Dolly Lunt Lewis, a widowed schoolteacher originally from Maine who was teaching in Madison, Georgia, and brought her to Burge to share in managing the farm and to be a mother to his children.
