Hancock House

About this property

The Hancock House, also known as the Alpha House, is an American historic home located at 300 Sussex Street in Bluefield, West Virginia. The house was built in 1907 and became the chapter house of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity from 1962 to 2000. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990. Hancock House is a mansion in Bluefield, West Virginia that was built in 1907 on a site for Ora and Charles Benjamin Hancock and their ten children. Hancock was self-educated man who became a millionaire through the Bluefield Hardware Co., a wholesaler for mining and hardware supplies. Later, he was an investor in the Kingsport Hardware in Kingsport, Tennessee. He also a stockbroker for 25 years, dabbled in the coal industry, and established the Bluefield Furniture Co. Bluefield Furniture Co. became on 25 acres (10 ha) of the largest wholesale furniture business in the Southern United States. In 2015, both Bluefield Furniture Co. and Bluefield Hardware Co. were still in business. After Charles Hancock died in the early 1940s, Ora sold the house to the Del Ramage. Once fashionable and historically white, by the early 1960s, Hancock House's neighborhood transitioned into a mostly Black neighborhood as coal mining and the railroad grew in the area. The Ramage family sold the house to Alpha Phi Alpha of Bluefield State College, an historical black university, in 1962. Alpha Phi Alpha is a historically Black college and community-based social fraternity, founded at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, on December 4, 1906. It established its Alpha Zeta Lambda chapter for individuals associated with Bluefield Colored Institute and Browns Creek District High School on January 28, 1927. A second chapter, Beta Theta, was chartered for undergraduate students at Bluefield Colored Institute on March 5, 1932, becoming the first national fraternity on what would become Bluefield State University. At the time Alpha Zeta Lambda became a graduate chapter, which included Henry Lake Dickason and Duke Ellington, amongst its members. Alpha Zeta Lambda chapter organized a Housing Foundation and purchased the Hancock House from the Ramage family in 1962. Thus, it became the largest house owned by African Americans in the region. Alpha Zeta Lambda chapter dedicated its renamed Alpha House on September 29, 1963, with a gala that was attended by hundreds of from the area and across the United States. The fraternity turned Alpha House into a fraternity chapter house and social and cultural center during the era of segregation. The main level was used for community meetings, parties, and balls, while its upstairs provided housing for undergraduate fraternity members. Duke Ellington performed in Alpha House on December 12, 1966.

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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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