Rocking chairs line the front porch of Andalusia, the farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where Flannery O’Connor spent the last thirteen years of her life. From one of those seats, it’s easy to imagine the titan of Southern literature’s stories playing out in the former cotton fields and tangle of woods off Highway 441. You can see right where a tractor in the meadow might have tipped over, crushing a man as it does in O’Connor’s novella “The Displaced Person.” Or the barn from which the Bible salesman from the short story “Good Country People” ran off, carting a stolen prosthetic leg.

O’Connor’s unambiguous sense of place is foundational to her stories, but a century after her birth, her legacy projects far beyond the white framed farmhouse and its peacock pen out back. All this year, and especially during the week of March 25—what would have been the writer’s hundredth birthday—Andalusia will honor O’Connor in ways big and small: new exhibitions; a screening of Ethan Hawke’s film about her, Wildcat; a day of music on March 29.

“O’Connor has truly an international reach,” says Andalusia’s curator, Cassie Munnell. Lucinda Williams and R.E.M. have claimed her work as a North Star. Bruce Springsteen, it’s said, introduced her fiction to Bono, who gathered inspiration from it for U2’s The Joshua Tree. The Coen brothers have cited her gory influence on their films.

For O’Connor devotees, a trip to Andalusia is a pilgrimage, or as one clever fan dubbed it, a Millgrimage. Visitors to Milledgeville experience the world as she saw it: the front bedroom where she wrote each morning, desk facing inward and curtains closed; the outbuildings that housed the itinerant farmhands who inspired many of her characters; the front porch where she’d teach students and chat with writers who stopped by to meet her; peafowl roosting outside.

In 2017, Georgia College and State University took over stewardship of the property from a private foundation, and in 2023, it cut the ribbon on a sleek new interpretive center. With a minimalist, farmhouse-like silhouette, the center houses many of O’Connor’s possessions: a belted dress covered in green chickens; the children’s book The Little Lame Prince, which she read (and critiqued) as a child. In March, a new exhibition, Flannery at 100, will unveil some of her belongings that have never been displayed.

Up the drive rises the house, an 1850s Plantation Plain structure that GCSU preserved to the time period when O’Connor and her mother, Regina, lived there: from 1951, after O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus, until 1964, when she died at age thirty-nine. The team fixed broken plasterwork, refinished hardwood floors, and restored the second-floor guest rooms, previously closed to the public. Downstairs, the kitchen table is still set for two. The Hotpoint refrigerator O’Connor bought with royalties from the Gene Kelly–helmed TV adaptation of her short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” still stands (O’Connor hated the movie, she wrote in a letter to a friend, though she didn’t mind the extra income). In the front bedroom, her crutches lean against her desk.

In nearby Eatonton, the Georgia Writers Museum provides an in-depth introduction to the wider area’s literary wealth. Currently undergoing a top-to-bottom renovation and set to reopen this spring, the new space will show how authors have long taken inspiration from the entire region’s rich soil and history. As Melissa Swindell, executive director of the museum, shares, “These stories couldn’t have happened anywhere else.”