Orange Hall

About this property

Orange Hall c. 1830, is located at 311 Osborne St., St. Marys, Georgia, United States, located within the St. Marys Historic District in Camden County and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 7, 1973. In 2011, Orange Hall was added to the list of the state of Georgia's ten most endangered historic sites by the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation. Orange Hall is a good example of the temple-form Greek Revival dwelling. A frame building with clapboard siding, it is among the first structures of Greek Revival design in America. The name originated from the orange trees that surrounded the house. Other details include: two stories, a gabled roof, interior chimneys, front center entrance with side lights and transom surmounted by low pedimented lintel, front tetrastyle prostyle Doric pedimented portico supported by projecting basement, and a rear center recessed two-story porch. The Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record has the following data recorded regarding Orange Hall. Owner in 1934: S.C. Townsend, Date of Erection: 1810–1815, Architect: No record, Builder: No record, Built for the Rev. Horace Southworth Pratt, a Presbyterian minister. This building of the Early Republican period is a Doric prostyle temple. The pediment is flattened and the columns are widely spaced. At the rear end is a superimposed inset portico, one porch above the other. The brink basement storey is stuccoed and has stucco quoins of inch projection. In the basement used to be the old kitchen, now marked by its whitewashed walls, a herringbone brick floor pattern and a Dutch oven. The old Dining Room was under the front portico. The property on which Orange Hall stands today was originally granted to William Ashley, one of the twenty founders of St. Marys, in 1787. Phineas Miller is listed as the owner of the lot when it was sold to Ethan Clarke in 1803. In 1826, the lot was divided and the northern half was sold to the wealthy John Wood and Horace Southworth Pratt, a Presbyterian minister. Pratt had arrived in St. Marys around 1820, established the First Presbyterian Church of St. Marys in 1822, and married Wood's daughter, Jane, in 1823. In 1829, before construction of Orange Hall began, Pratt's wife, Jane, died. Pratt remained in St. Marys and remarried a few years later. In 1838, construction of Orange hall completed, with master carpenter Isaac Slayton listed as the builder. In 1839, Pratt, a Yale and Princeton graduate, took a position as a professor at the University of Alabama and left Orange Hall behind. General Duncan Lamont Clinch is thought to have lived there when Pratt left for Alabama. Pratt died in 1840 before he could return to Orange Hall.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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