Best known as the Shedd House today, this landmark originally served as a boarding house/dormitory for the Georgia Normal College & Business Institute, which was located across the street. The school opened in 1899 and this house is its only surviving link, to my knowledge. A postcard of the dormitory can be seen here, but it depicts a much larger building with the same architecture. This leads me to believe this may just be a portion of that original structure, also referred to as the Central Hotel. According to Doni Helms, whose grandfather Shedd owned the building after its public use, it also served as a boarding house for railroad workers for a time. He recalls that the brass room numbers could still be found on the doors when they first moved in. Doni has written a book about his experiences in this house and growing up in Abbeville called Tales from 316 Depot Street.
This house belonged to my grandparents. I grew up in it.
This beautiful Victorian style house used to be a boarding house for a college that was built right across the street, and was later a boarding house that travelers and rail workers on the railroad used during stopovers… when my Papa Shedd bought the house, it still had the brass room numbers on all of the bedrooms, upstairs and downstairs…
My family lived in this house for several years back in the late 60’s and early 70’s… I wrote a book about our time, and the crazy people I grew up with there in Abbeville… the title of the book is: “Tales From 3:16 Depot Street” and can be found at Amazon.com and lots of book vendors online…
I’ll look for it!!
My grandparents owned this house for many years.
Beautiful, love that house
I checked it out on Google Maps. It had a HUGE tree in front of it at one time recently, glad they chopped it down, sort of. It was hiding this beauty!
Actually, TWO trees!! LOL!
There actually used to be three large pecan trees in front of the house… we used to use one of them as a late night escape route from the top balcony… good times…
Since I wasn’t bad like y’all and much younger, I enjoyed climbing them. Sure do miss this house and Mama and Papa Shedd!