Originally home to the Nimrod K. Sullivan family, this eclectic home was built in 1879. The Sullivan family started the Sullivan Hardware Company, a prominent business in Anderson. The building where their store was in downtown Anderson still exists today.
Located in Anderson, South Carolina, are likely the last standing slave houses in an upstate South Carolina town. Four houses sit along an alleyway in the Anderson Historic District. Architectural historians determined three houses are antebellum, with the other one built after the Civil War.
These houses were up for demolition in 2009 when The Palmetto Trust for Historic Preservation stepped in and purchased them. According to the newspaper searches, people lived in these houses until 2008. They were condemned after complaints to the city.
It is suspected that the slave alley was tied to an in-town estate, likely the Caldwell-Johnson-Morris Cottage. According to the 1860 Slave Census, Margaret Morris enslaved two women. Her house is on the same street and one block down from the slave alley.
Below is the 1918 Sanborn map, which shows the four houses in a row. Unfortunately, previous Sanborn maps do not go east enough to show the houses.
In 2011, Joseph McGill of the Slave Dwelling Project stayed in one of the houses.
Hubbard-McFall-King House was built after the honeymoon trip of John and Lavina Hubbard, where they fell in love with similarly styled homes along the Hudson River in New York City. This style, Chinese Chippendale, is a relatively rare type of Queen Anne. It’s scarce in the South. There are four homes in the greater Anderson area that were built in this style. Two are in town. The other two are inaccessible. There is one that was up for sale a few years ago. You can see it here.
Chinese Chippendale architecture refers to specific banister styles influenced by the cabinetmaker and furniture designer Thomas Chippendale.
Reverend Thomas J. Earle was a minister and educator who settled in Gowensville, South Carolina. He founded the Gowensville Seminary, which educated students from around the area. Built in 1874, Earlsedale was made of bricks that were made on-site. Students would often board at the home while going to the school.
I photographed this I-House, also known as a plantation plain, in August 2020. As I was driving home today and avoiding the interstate, I caught a glimpse of the house and realized it had been lost to fire.
The only information I can find on the home is that it was built in the 1880s. I suspect it might be earlier than that.
Pelzer Presbyterian Church was constructed in 1896 with Gothic Revival influence. In 1905, the church added a two-story, five-sided building for Sunday school. The Sunday school design is inspired by the “Akron Plan,” which divided up the different Sunday school classes in an efficient manner. Many Protestant churches adopted it, but it fell out of favor in the early 1900s.
It was placed on the National Register in 1996.
