Mountain Home was built between 1830 and 1834 out of bricks made on the property, about 2 miles west of White Sulphur Springs. Its original shutters have been removed for restoration.
WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va. -- The stately mansion has been a home, an inn and even a stop on the Underground Railroad.
What Mountain Home will be next is the dilemma facing Lewisburg lawyer Paul Detch and his siblings.
They inherited the 176-year-old house from their mother, Rosalie Detch, who died last year at age 92. She purchased the house at auction 10 or 12 years ago.
"We want to see it restored and preserved," said Detch, during a recent tour of Mountain Home.
But to what?
The brick Colonial-style structure is on the National Register of Historic Places. It sits on 48 acres overlooking U.S. 60, just off the White Sulphur Springs exit of Interstate 77.
Because of its location, the Detch family thinks it's obvious that the house should be a commercial enterprise -- a restaurant, perhaps, or furniture store, funeral home, bed and breakfast, conference center.
"We're interested in seeing what the people in the community and the state might suggest as to what this property could be restored to so that it could be of use as a commercial enterprise," Detch said.
His mother was about 80 when she bought the mansion with the intention of building a hotel on the land. She had owned and operated the Savannah Inn in Lewisburg for years, till she was 85.
During her stewardship, she repaired the windows and the roof. Detch mainly has made cosmetic improvements on the first floor.
The three first rooms are each 22 by 22 feet with 12-foot-high ceilings. The intricately carved fireplace mantels are original.
Detch isn't sure who made the mantels but believes it was Conrad Burgess, a man noted for his carpentry in the Greenbrier Valley in the early 19th century. "His fingerprints are all over them," he said of the woodwork.
Ruth Woods Dayton wrote that perhaps no other house mentioned in "Lewisburg Landmarks," her 1957 book, "can be found in more complete original condition than Mountain Home."
She noted, "A rare circumstance is the preservation of much of the original interior paint in interestingly different colors, beet red, putty, dark blue-green -- shades all seen in restored Williamsburg today."
Detch has tried to follow the original colors in painting the rooms and fireplaces. In the yet unfinished foyer, the paint has been scraped down to reveal that it once was red.
The thick oak plank floors are those that were installed when the mansion, first named Locust Hill, was built between 1830 and 1834. The old box locks and brass knobs are on the 40-inch doors.
Faux wood grain is painted on some of door panels. In the parlor, the wood baseboards are painted black and splattered with white paint for a look of marble. "It was quite popular at the time," Dayton noted in an earlier book, "Greenbrier Pioneers and Their Homes," published in 1942. Although there is chair rail paneling in the main rooms, there is no crown molding.
WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va. -- The stately mansion has been a home, an inn and even a stop on the Underground Railroad.
What Mountain Home will be next is the dilemma facing Lewisburg lawyer Paul Detch and his siblings.
They inherited the 176-year-old house from their mother, Rosalie Detch, who died last year at age 92. She purchased the house at auction 10 or 12 years ago.
"We want to see it restored and preserved," said Detch, during a recent tour of Mountain Home.
But to what?
The brick Colonial-style structure is on the National Register of Historic Places. It sits on 48 acres overlooking U.S. 60, just off the White Sulphur Springs exit of Interstate 77.
Because of its location, the Detch family thinks it's obvious that the house should be a commercial enterprise -- a restaurant, perhaps, or furniture store, funeral home, bed and breakfast, conference center.
"We're interested in seeing what the people in the community and the state might suggest as to what this property could be restored to so that it could be of use as a commercial enterprise," Detch said.
His mother was about 80 when she bought the mansion with the intention of building a hotel on the land. She had owned and operated the Savannah Inn in Lewisburg for years, till she was 85.
During her stewardship, she repaired the windows and the roof. Detch mainly has made cosmetic improvements on the first floor.
The three first rooms are each 22 by 22 feet with 12-foot-high ceilings. The intricately carved fireplace mantels are original.
Detch isn't sure who made the mantels but believes it was Conrad Burgess, a man noted for his carpentry in the Greenbrier Valley in the early 19th century. "His fingerprints are all over them," he said of the woodwork.
Ruth Woods Dayton wrote that perhaps no other house mentioned in "Lewisburg Landmarks," her 1957 book, "can be found in more complete original condition than Mountain Home."
She noted, "A rare circumstance is the preservation of much of the original interior paint in interestingly different colors, beet red, putty, dark blue-green -- shades all seen in restored Williamsburg today."
Detch has tried to follow the original colors in painting the rooms and fireplaces. In the yet unfinished foyer, the paint has been scraped down to reveal that it once was red.
The thick oak plank floors are those that were installed when the mansion, first named Locust Hill, was built between 1830 and 1834. The old box locks and brass knobs are on the 40-inch doors.
Faux wood grain is painted on some of door panels. In the parlor, the wood baseboards are painted black and splattered with white paint for a look of marble. "It was quite popular at the time," Dayton noted in an earlier book, "Greenbrier Pioneers and Their Homes," published in 1942. Although there is chair rail paneling in the main rooms, there is no crown molding.
"A lot of the woodworking skills were developed in Williamsburg. Apprentices trained there and moved west. So the Greenbrier Valley was about 20 years behind the times," Detch explained.
The bricks for the house were made on the site. Stone was used for the foundation and to line the well that was uncovered in the yard.
The large kitchen was added after the main house was built. An iron crane hangs in the 10-foot-wide fireplace.
Still visible in the rear of the house is a line on the bricks where a large overhanging roof covered a porch that served as the summer dining room.
The roof concealed the lower sash of a back window. "Back under this roof was the war-time hiding place for the family treasures," Dayton wrote.
Through the same window, escaped slaves climbed to be hidden behind a heavy tapestry covering the interior window.
That's the account, according to the Dickson family. Detch has searched the title to the land back to the original land grants. James Dickson, a native of Ireland, obtained his first land grants on Howard's Creek in 1785. Mountain Home and some acreage remained in the family until the mid-1960s.
The Dicksons were farmers, entrepreneurs and "independent-thinking people," Detch said, to be aiding escaped slaves. They, too, were probably slave owners in an area with strong Southern sympathies, he said.
"They all knew what was going on here," he said of then highly dangerous risk to both the runaway slaves and Dicksons who helped them. "I think it tells a different side of the Southern story."
Detch surmises that the runaway slaves would go up into the hills behind Mountain Home and make their way to Anthony, still a remote part of Greenbrier County. The next stop would be a church at Auto, a journey of several days.
Trying to avoid people, he believes the slaves would go into Pocahontas County and eventually make their way to the Little Kanawha River, which they would follow to Parkersburg and Marietta, Ohio. From there, the goal would be get to Ashtabula, Ohio, on Lake Erie, a boat ride from Canada.
During the Civil War, with battles in Lewisburg and White Sulphur Springs, Mountain Home probably would have been burned except that "Dickson had a friend in a general with the North who stationed a guard at the house," Dayton wrote.
In later years, Dayton said frame guesthouses were built on the premises for a small summer resort. The Dicksons had stables, and the healing mineral waters of White Sulphur Springs were nearby. The family supplied the riding horses used at The Greenbrier.
Detch's father, who practiced law for 58 years in Greenbrier County, knew one of the Dicksons who had been blinded in a mine explosion in Colorado. The man would make his way down the front steps of Mountain Home to the stables, where he would mount his horse and be taken daily into White Sulphur Springs.
Handwriting scribbled on an attic eave provides clues to another chapter of the mansion's past. Sales of whiskey -- date, amount and price -- are still visible. "10 gallon whiskey, $6 gallon" reads one notation.
The large attic probably would have served as a dormitory. Detch hasn't tackled the attic or the second floor of the house. He doesn't want to make improvements until he knows how the mansion will be used. "Where do we go from here?"
Detch can be reached at his law offices at 201 N. Court St., Lewisburg, WV 24901; phone 304-645-1993.
Reach Rosalie Earle at ea...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5115.
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