Orna Villa’s history really begins in North Carolina with Alexander Means.
Dr. Means was born in Statesville, North Carolina, on February 6, 1801. His father had immigrated from the Tyrone County of Ireland and his mother was from Pennsylvania. Alexander was their only child.
In the early nineteenth century, public education was virtually non-existant in North Carolina. Alexander received his early education from his mother who taught him reading, writing and basic arithmetic. Then, when he was ten or eleven, he attended what was called a “field school.” Later, his education was furthered at private “academies,” which were basically tuteledges under learned men. When Alexander was seventeen, his father’s financial resources had been depleted. Several of Alexander’s mentors, impressed by the young man’s abilities, stepped forward offering to finance his education at the University of South Carolina, but his mother refused the offers and Alexander went to work as a school teacher.
Alexander Means: The Doctor
After a brief stint as a teacher and then a store clerk, Alexander moved to what
was then the very rural “frontier” of Georgia where he studied medicine under the guidance of a Dr. Randolf and a Dr. Walker. There was little in the way of formal medical schools in the early 1800s; in fact, even well into the twentieth century, 90 percent of all doctors had no college education at all, but learned their profession through tuteleges and apprenticeships under practicing doctors.
Young Dr. Alexander Means purchased a small farmhouse in Newton County, Georgia near the town of Covington in the early 1820s and set about its remodeling into the great Greek Revival house it is today. He named it Orna Villa, meaning Bird House, or House of Birds.
Alexander Means did attend one session at Transylvania College’s School of Medicine in Lexington Kentucky in 1825. He then returned to Georgia and formed a medical practice with Dr. Henry Gaither in Covington, Georgia.
Above is a picture of Dr. Means’s “medical bag.” While to a modern eye, it may look more like a carpenter’s tool box, this is typical of the medical instrumentation of the time. It was found and continues to be lovingly preserved by Jim Watterson, who became the thirteenth owner of Orna Villa and lived there for more than two decades.
Dr. Means: The Inventor
Dr. Means became fascinated with what was being discovered on the new frontier of electricity in the 1840s. In 1851, he traveled to England where he met Sir Michael Faraday and Sir Charles Lyell. Inspired by their work with electricity, Dr. Means began his own experiments. On June 2, 1857 (when Thomas Edison, who later became known as the “Father of the Electric Light,” was but ten years old) Dr. Means exhibited America’s first incandescent light at Atlanta’s Old City Hall.
Dr. Means built a machine that produced frictional electricity causing current to pass through wires that were attached to a chunk of black carbon, which caused the material to burst into light. One eyewitness account stated that “Never … have I seen a more brilliant light. Nothing in all the phenomena of our wonderful age has ever impressed me more than this exhibition and I can never forget it as long as my memory lasts.”
Dr. Means was received by the elite Royal Academy of Science in London and was a member of the corresponding American Scientific Association.
Most of Dr. Means’s experiments were conducted in a second-floor room at Orna Villa.
Orna Villa 