MACON, Ga. — It's been nearly two weeks since three homes were destroyed, and a few more were damaged on Walnut Street.
Edwin Atkins lives across the street from where the homes burned. He moved there in 2015 because he loves the historical value of the neighborhood.
"The slate row houses were built in 1850 by the contractor that built the Hay House," Atkins said.
Now history will tell another story about this neighborhood.
"There's a lot of questions that this fire has, has posed that we need to follow up on. And one thing is what's gonna happen across the street," Atkins said.
For starters, he'd like to see the burned buildings come down completely.
"It's really important that the county condemn 'em all and get 'em down. And not let us- cause I'm smelling the, the fire every night. The wind blows toxic fumes that are still over there, you know, into my window," Atkins said.
Over at Historic Macon Foundation, Executive Director Nathan Lott agrees.
"The fact that those chimneys are still standing does kind of testify to how well built they were," Lott said.
He said the fire was tragic for both the residents, and the neighbors.
"It's a tragedy for the whole community to lose that piece of architectural heritage," Lott said.
He said the homes that burned down date back about 130 years.
Atkins hopes the owners restore the homes, and bring the neighborhood back to what it was.
"We'd like to know that it's historically in keeping with other buildings here," Atkins said.
Lott said that hopefully won't be a problem.
"The area is within a design review district, a designated historic district. So whatever is built back there will have to go through a process of planning and zoning," Lott said.
13WMAZ reached out to the Bibb County Sheriff's Office to see if the man arrested for causing the fire, Derrick Bell, was still in custody.
The Bibb County Sheriff's Office told us they can't access those records right now due to the county's system-wide outage. They did say their technology team is still working on restoring county web pages and online features, but they have no timeline for when services will return to normal.