About the Bandy Center

The Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia is a research archives, heritage preservation resource, and community outreach initiative of Dalton State College.

Our Mission

The Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia collects, preserves, and interprets the material and cultural histories of Northwest Georgia’s many communities.

Our Vision

Through archival collection, artifact preservation, museum exhibition, scholarly research, and heritage programming, the Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia strives to ignite curiosity about the past, spark conversation in the present, and inspire the future by articulating and making accessible a compelling, equitable, and inclusive vision for community identity and memory.

Land Acknowledgment

The Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia acknowledges the Cherokee people whose lives, lifeways, knowledge, and culture thrived in the ridges and valleys of our region. Between May 1838 and March 1839, more than 15,000 Cherokee inhabitants of Georgia were forcibly removed from and dispossessed of this land, and we mourn the deaths of the approximately 6,000 men, women, and children who died on the 1,200-mile march westward now called the Trail of Tears. The Bandy Heritage Center seeks to honor the Cherokee Nation and earlier indigenous caretakers of this land, and to honor Dicksie Bandy’s own efforts to raise awareness of the means by which Northwest Georgia’s current inhabitants came to call this place home.

About Jack Bandy

The Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia was founded in 2008 through a generous gift to Dalton State College from Mr. Jack Bandy. Our efforts to preserve and share Northwest Georgia’s many stories reflect Mr. Bandy’s own deep connections to our chenille and carpet tufting industries and his optimism that our region’s past will shape its future.

A lifelong Daltonian, Mr. Bandy inherited both his entrepreneurial spirit and his interest in the preservation of local history from his parents, Burl Judson “B.J.” and Dicksie Bradley Bandy, leaders in the chenille-tufting business’s formative era and founding members of the Tufted Textile Manufacturers’ Association. Their success enabled Dicksie Bandy to act on her passion for local history in general and Cherokee history in particular; as an ambassador to the Cherokee Nation, Mrs. Bandy championed land acknowledgment generations before the term became common, culminating in the restoration and preservation of the Chief Vann House in Spring Place, a project begun in 1958 and completed six years later.

On August 20, 1956, Jack Bandy partnered with M.B. “Bud” Seretean and Guy Henley to found Coronet Industries, the first Dalton carpet company to trade on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1971, RCA purchased Coronet. Over the decades that followed, Mr. Bandy’s generosity, philanthropy, and commitment to his community nurtured and sustained numerous institutions, from the Creative Arts Guild to the Cherokee Boys’ Estate to the Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia. Jack Bandy passed away on March 29, 2020.