Southern home offers visitors a doorway to the past : Historic Culpepper House has been reincarnated as a small inn.

Dr. John Addy, a Confederate soldier, returned from the Civil War and built a family home here in 1871.

Now, 120 years later, the place that provided the doctor some much needed R&R; (rest and recuperation) offers visitors B&B; (bed and breakfast).

That transformation puts the home, named the Culpepper House after Dr. Wilbur Culpepper, one of its early owners and redesigners, among a sharply rising number of grand old American houses that have been converted from private family dwellings to historical showplaces with rooms for rent.

“It’s a new cottage industry,” said Mary Finch Hoyt, director of communications for the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington, apparently intending no pun. “The whole thing has mushroomed.”

Of course some bed and breakfasts are nothing more than motels with lace curtains and free doughnuts. The number of hostelries calling themselves B&Bs; has quadrupled to at least 20,000 over the last 10 years, many seeking to take advantage of “a rediscovery of the joys of home and hearth,” according to the book “Feather Beds & Flapjacks,” published last year by the National Trust.

But more and more historic properties are opening their doors for another reason: the difficulty and expense in maintaining the old homes.

The Culpepper House is one of them. Like many grand old homes across America, the two-story frame dwelling was falling apart back in the 1970s and was nursed back to health amid a burst of preservation energy. Now it is sustained by tourists, much as many great private estates in England now subsist on the income from tours and overnight guests.

Before its reclamation, the Culpepper House “was in sad shape,” recalls Jack Thompson, president of the Senoia Area Historical Society.

Now painted yellow with white gingerbread trim, the 11-room (including four bedrooms) house sits primly at the corner of Broad and Morgan streets in this frozen-in-time village of about 1,000 people. Located 37 miles southwest of Atlanta, the whole town has been listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

The stately pace of the town, along with the unassuming charm of the Culpepper House, attracted Mary Brown here from Dallas after she retired as a dietitian at the Veterans Administration medical center. A native Georgian, she bought the house in 1982 and started her B&B; the next year because she “thought it would be fun to do.”

B&B; operators, she said, “are saving (historic homes) for future generations.” But, “we would not save them unless we put them to some kind of use because they eat money.”

Brown said: “I’m afraid to add up (the cost of the renovation).” She charges $50 to $60 for a room and breakfast.

Brown, who collects everything from carved elephants to miniature bells and calls herself “a true Victorian,” said many visitors “feel like they’re going back in time.”

That feeling comes with any visit to an old home that has been restored, and the specific image depends on the part of the country.

Throughout this region, the old homes conjure up pictures of a languid Old South, dripping cotton money gathered from slave labor, a South that rose, then tumbled--humbled in the War Between the States and thrown into tumult after it.

There are many mansions in the South, including some along the Mississippi River in Louisiana and Mississippi, that evoke images of Tara from “Gone With the Wind” and seem impossibly lavish.

Others are more modest, like the Culpepper House. These seem more emotionally accessible than the Taras to people interested in the everyday life of 100 years ago.

The Culpepper House raises questions. What was Dr. Addy like? What did Dr. Culpepper think as he sat in his elegant dining room--where Brown now serves breakfast to tourists? Did they drink whiskey with cronies behind the parlor’s closed pocket doors? Did they relive the war? Who planted the old oaks outside?

The house provides “a great sense of history,” said Mary Kalina of Cape Coral, Fla., who, with her husband, Craig, recently stayed at Culpepper House. “We really felt we were in old Georgia.”

Kalina said her visit inspired a “concern over what it was like to live” during the 19th Century and at the same time gave her a sense of the times. “I’d never get a chance to see some of these old homes” if they were not for rent, she said.