The Grandy Mansion
The Grandy Mansion property, 591 acres all in one body lay beautifully exposed to the South and was singularly well adapted to building purposes. It sloped so as to give good drainage, and there were not a half dozen waste acres in the boundary.
The elegant old Grandy Mansion and all out buildings was in excellent repair. It had eight large rooms and a well arranged basement with a complement of out-buildings. It was located in a fashionable portion of the city and was within a few minutes of the City Hall and Court House. There was also on the property, one four room dwelling with an acre of ground attached and necessary out buildings, and several smaller tenement houses ranging in value from $200 to $500.
The elegant old Grandy Mansion and all out buildings was in excellent repair. It had eight large rooms and a well arranged basement with a complement of out-buildings. It was located in a fashionable portion of the city and was within a few minutes of the City Hall and Court House. There was also on the property, one four room dwelling with an acre of ground attached and necessary out buildings, and several smaller tenement houses ranging in value from $200 to $500.
This house, one of the most striking Greek Revival style structures standing in Granville County, was built for merchant Titus Grandy and his wife, the former Elizabeth Bell, in the late 1840s or 1850s. It was purchased by Dr. George A. and Eliza Ormsby Coggeshall in the early 1890s when they moved to Oxford from Massachusetts. It left their family following Elizabeth’s death and passed through a number of hands before being acquired in 1953 by Atlas and Magdalena Critcher.
A traditional one-room deep, two story tall, center-hall plan structure, the heavy timber frame dwelling has a number of unusual decorative features. Its chimneys—which are centered rather than placed at the exterior end walls- are formed of triple groups of stuccoed octagonal pots. This feature is found at only one other extant structure in the county, the Paschall—Daniel House to the south. A rare Gothic Revival style fringe underpins the house’s low hipped roof. The fluted Ionic columns of its front porch are the only properly fashioned, local antebellum example of that order. Originally standing farther to the south of Front Street, the house was shifted forward on its lot in the 1920s. In the process it lost its rear ell, part of which still stands on Coggeshall Street today. A later ell was subsequently added to the house. |