This is typical of what many of Washington’s early Federal style houses once looked like before they were modified into grander styles. Begun as a two-room dogtrot by James Alexander, James Shepard enlarged it soon after he purchased it. In her iconic 1865 book, War Time Journal of a Georgia Girl , Eliza Frances Andrews refers to it as “Mrs. Cooper’s House”. The same passage cites the indignation that “Fanny Andrews” expressed due to the commandeering of Mrs. Cooper’s house as a convalescent home for a Yankee soldier.
In 1810, Oliver Hillhouse Prince built the two-story Federal style house that makes up the front section of the present structure. Prince was commissioned by Georgia to lay out the city of Macon in 1822 and sold the house to Augustus Gibson in 1825. Prince later served as a United States Senator. When Alexander Pope, great-grandfather of Washington mayor Edward Pope, bought the Prince house from Augustus Gibson on 8 June 1825, he was apparently already in residence there. Pope then purchased the old 1785 Wilkes County Courthouse, which was still standing opposite the public square where a new courthouse had been built in 1817. Two rooms of the old courthouse building were moved intact and make up the southwest quadrant of the house as it stands today. Other of this lumber was used in part of the construction of the southeast quadrant of the house. This addition left a thirty-inch space between the addition and the original house which accommodates the stairs leading from the circular stairway which existed in the original house. At this time a complete new hip roof was constructed to cover the entire house. Alexander Pope died in 1864 and his widow and children lived in the house until 1873 when the house was sold to William Simpson. Many changes in the house were made by Mr. Simpson and his son, Dr. Robert G. Simpson. Upon Dr. Simpson’s death in 1938, the home was left to his nephew, Dr. Robert G. Stephens, who lived here and practiced medicine until his death in 1974. Mayor Pope bought the house from Emma Stephens Wilson, daughter of Dr. Stephens, in 1977.
Now a private residence, this served for many years as a stagecoach inn and tavern. It’s a truly amazing survivor; few antebellum inns and taverns remain.
West Robert Toombs Historic District, National Register of Historic Places
Built by A. W. Hill and purchased in 1877 by Benjamin Screven Irvin, who served as the first president of the Washington Board of Education and was mayor for three different terms.
West Robert Toombs Historic District, National Register of Historic Places
Built by William H. Pope in 1832 in the Federal style, Washington’s grandest home was given to Henry Allen Tupper in 1853 by his wife’s father, Ker Boyce of Charleston. Tupper, a well-loved Baptist minister, remodeled the house in 1860 by adding the 18 fluted Doric columns which surround it. Families who owned the house before the Tuppers included: Pope, Willis, Bowdre Semmes, Tupper and Kemme.
Edward Augustus Barnett purchased the house in 1908 and it remained in the Barnett family for nearly a century.
This breathtaking Victorian was built by T. C. Hogue, incorporating an 1850 cottage (seen at the rear of the house in the photo below). Dr. C. J. May bought the house in 1935 and it was restored in 2000 by Julian May.
West Robert Toombs Historic District, National Register of Historic Places
