About Jack Bandy

Burl Jackson “Jack” Bandy, 1926-2020

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.