Hanniball Kimball

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The first Kimball House was built of brick and painted yellow with brown trim.
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The first Kimball House was built of brick and painted yellow with brown trim.

Hanniball Ingalls Kimball (May 16, 1832April 28, 1895) was an American entrepreneur and important businessman in post-war Atlanta, Georgia.

Born in Oxford County, Maine to family of Methodist wheel-wrights, he stayed in that and the carriage business moving first to Norway, Maine then later to the largest carriage manufacturing center, New Haven, Connecticut where he was a manager for the G .& D. Cook & Co Carriage Makers. Unfortunately, many of their customers were in the South and after the beginning of the American Civil War money owed them was not payed and the business failed.

Kimball then moved to Central City, Colorado as the agent for a mining company and regained his fortune. While in Colorado, he met George Pullman who hired him in 1866 to run the Pullman Company's southern operations. Though initially to be headquarted in Nashville, Tennessee, he thought it would be more prosperous in Atlanta and moved his family there in 1867.

He was a major figure there until scandals at the end of Radical Republican power in the early 1870s but he made two significant returns to town.

He built what was to become the first capitol building in Atlanta after the government moved from Milledgeville in 1868.