Located on E. Franklin Street, the Honeymoon Cottage was built in 1880 for Hettie Brown Brownlee, the new bride of Samuel Davis Brownlee. The Queen Anne Victorian home was built on three acres of land provided to the newlyweds by Hettie’s father, Elijah Webb Brown. The home stayed in the Brown-Brownlee family until 1955.
The modified Greek Revival house on McDuffie Street is known as the Poppe House. Located in Anderson, South Carolina, there seems to be some conflict in its history so I will share two different stories. According to the 1971 National Register of Historic Places application, the Poppe House was built in 1853 by Elizabeth Earle for her son and new wife. It was then sold to Charles Henry Julius and Alice Poppe in 1862, a couple from the Alsace-Lorraine region of Germany.
A 1973 article in the Independent Daily Mail states that J. T. Harrison built the house on land formerly owned by Elizabeth Hampton Harrison Earle. Elizabeth Earle had given her son, Captain Samuel G. Earle, and his wife, Kate, the land, who then had a house built on it. Samuel Earle moved to Arkansas to serve in the Civil War. Captain Earle sold the house to J. T. (sometimes noted as J. L. in other articles) Harrison in 1859. Harrison then sold the house to J. B. Earle, uncle of Samuel G. Earle. J. B. Earle then sold the house to Charles Henry Julius and Alice Poppe, who sold the home to H. S. Carpenter in 1903. Carpenter then sold it to the Charles and Olive Minor family in 1922.
The bricks were made by enslaved labor. (Here is an interesting article on fingerprints in slave labor bricks.)According to the 1850 slave census, the Earle family held over 200 people in bondage. I am not finding specific slave census records for a JT or JL Harrison, but they exist for a James Harrison in Anderson County. This person held approximately 20 people in bondage.
As the longest owners, Julius and Alice Poppe lived there for over fifty years. They purchased the home in 1862. The NRHP application mentions that the couple were from Alsace-Lorraine, part of Germany. However, Alice hailed from England, as shown on her headstone, which is linked above. Julius owned a store downtown known for the variety of goods it sold.
Alice Poppe was blind. She would place glass bottles in the flower beds and use her cane to tap around her garden. A later owner of the house, Merrill Bamfield, shared in a news article (Anderson Independent-Mail, January 18, 1981) that he would still find the occasional bottle in the yard.
Finally, the Poppe House was photographed in 1933 for the Historic American Buildings Survey, the nation’s first documentation and preservation program. The project’s goal was to document “the builder’s art.”
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.
The ornate fretwork and balustrade make this one story Italianate home stand out. In some literature this home is described as Chinese Chippendale. Information on the home differs. Some articles indicate it was built in the early 1890s; others indicate in 1902. The home was built by the same Morris family that lived in the Caldwell-Johnson-Morris Cottage.
The home was sold to Nellie Bewley Frierson who then sold it to the Aubrey Marshall family.
