Kenworthy Hall

Kenworthy Hall, two miles west of Marion, Alabama, is the only surviving house Richard Upjohn designed for the Deep South: an asymmetrical Italianate villa in red brick and New York brownstone, built between 1858 and 1860 for the cotton factor Edward Kenworthy Carlisle and negotiated by post, letter by letter, across nine hundred miles. It was also a working plantation. The 1860 federal slave schedule records fifteen enslaved people on the estate, and the 1934 survey sheet notes that the framing "was shaped with the adz by the slaves." Locals came to call it Carlisle Hall, and during the decades it stood boarded up they began telling of a young woman at the window of the four-storey tower. Kathryn Tucker Windham and Margaret Gillis Figh collected the story as "The Faithful Vigil at Carlisle Hall," the third of the thirteen tales in their 1969 book "13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey." The federal historians who documented the house in 1997 called that fame fictional, and recorded what the tower room was really used for: raising silkworms and drying laundry. It is a National Historic Landmark, and it is a private home that cannot be visited.

On 4 May 1858 a cotton merchant in Perry County, Alabama, sat down and wrote to a stranger nine hundred miles away. "Desiring to build a house, a country residence, and at a loss for a plan, we address you as a well known Architect to ask you to draw us a plan, a rough sketch at first, which we hope may result in a suitable plan." The stranger was Richard Upjohn, architect of Trinity Church in Manhattan and, since the previous year, the first president of the American Institute of Architects. The letter-writer was Edward Kenworthy Carlisle, born near Augusta, Georgia, in 1810 and brought to Alabama as a boy by his widowed mother. Carlisle had made his fortune not by growing cotton but by moving it. From about 1838 he worked in Mobile as a commission merchant and cotton factor — the middleman who warehoused a planter's crop, hunted the best price in New Orleans, New York or Liverpool, and advanced credit against next year's harvest for a commission of two and a half per cent. His marriage in 1841 to Lucinda "Lucy" Wilson Walthall tied him into the founding families of the county. It was his brother-in-law Leonidas Walthall, already an Upjohn client, who passed on the design he had chosen not to build: "I have a friend who is preparing to build a house. I think the design No. 2 which you sent me would suit him exactly." What followed was a collaboration by post. Carlisle wanted "only the finest materials," the best construction, the simplest designs, and "all with the greatest economy." He reminded the architect that "proper ventilation is all important in this climate." He specified the cellar for barrels of fish and molasses, closets "connected with all the best rooms," a concealed servants' stair, and a kitchen kept out of the house entirely and joined to it by what he called "a covered way." Upjohn answered with an asymmetrical Italian villa in red brick and New York brownstone, its plan pulled apart into three zones — formal, family, service — and dominated by a massive off-centre tower of four storeys, lit at the top by twelve arched casement windows, three to a side. Building it was harder than designing it. In September 1858 Carlisle still had no builder: "not more than the foundations can be done before the fall and winter rains commence." On 4 November he reported that "the foundation [is] now laid off and work to commence." The master mason was Philip Bond, who expected to finish the brickwork by the following June. Sash, glazing, doors and brownstone came from New York by steamship, riverboat and rail; the brownstone arrived damaged. The National Historic Landmark nomination describes the brick as locally made, while the 1934 survey sheet at the head of the federal record says it was hauled in oxcarts from Cahaba, where it was fired. That same 1934 sheet records, without comment, who did the carpentry: "the framing was shaped with the adz by the slaves." This was a plantation, and the house is a document of it. The estate ran to about 440 acres. The 1860 federal slave schedule records Carlisle holding fifteen enslaved people — a modest number beside his relatives, several of whom held sixty-four, a hundred, a hundred and sixty-five. Household workers lived in a row of houses east of the detached kitchen and laundry. Upjohn's celebrated plan encodes the arrangement: a private stair for the family, a separate hidden stair for the enslaved staff winding unbroken from cellar to attic, and a row of bells on the back wall to summon them. Carlisle backed the Confederacy and prospered under the blockade; his firm Carlisle & Humphries saw profits reach an all-time high. After the surrender he was disenfranchised as a sympathiser whose taxable property exceeded twenty thousand dollars, and was later pardoned by President Andrew Johnson, the record noting that he had been "in favor of secession, believing it would stop slavery agitation." The old factorage system never recovered. In 1871 his wife, to whom he had prudently transferred the title in 1867, paid ninety dollars in tax on an estate now appraised at nine thousand. Carlisle died in January 1873. Lucy Carlisle held the house until 1899, when she deeded it to her daughter Augusta and left. It was boarded up. Augusta sold in 1914 and Kenworthy Hall passed out of the family for good. A run of absentee owners followed; it stood empty for much of the 1950s, and vandals broke the marble mantels, cut the locks out of the doors, burned the linen shelves and destroyed one of the Deep South's earliest sets of ornamental stained glass. Karen Klassen of Birmingham bought the ruin and nineteen acres in 1957 for four thousand dollars and spent a decade patching it. Heber and Nell Martin took over in 1967 and worked on it for thirty years. One detail explains why the house was so nearly lost. When federal surveyors first recorded it in 1934, they wrote "Architect: Unknown" and put Carlisle himself down as the builder. The Carlisle letters had been filed in the New York Public Library among his brother-in-law's correspondence, and nobody connected them to this house until the 1970s. Kenworthy Hall was listed on the National Register in 1990, fully documented by a Historic American Buildings Survey team in the summer of 1997, and designated a National Historic Landmark on 18 August 2004.

Kenworthy Hall is a private house and it is not open to the public. There are no opening hours, no tickets, no guided tours and no ghost nights. National Historic Landmark designation recognises the building's architectural importance; it grants nobody a right of access, and the property has been continuously in private hands and lived in since 1858. It stands on the north side of Alabama Highway 14 — the old Marion-to-Greensboro road — exactly two miles west of the Marion courthouse square, in Perry County, postcode 36756. The landmark boundary covers just nineteen acres of the original 440-acre estate. Do not expect to see much from the car: the nomination itself notes that "though only a few hundred feet from a state highway, the mansion is screened from public view by foliage," and screening is at its thickest from spring to autumn. AL-14 is a fast rural road with nowhere sensible to stop, and the drive is private. Photograph it, if at all, from a legal pull-off, and do not turn in. The honest alternative is better than a roadside glimpse and costs nothing. The 1997 Historic American Buildings Survey record — a full set of measured drawings plus large-format photographs by Jack Boucher — is public domain and downloadable from the Library of Congress, and it shows the rooms, the three staircases and the tower interior in far more detail than any visitor would see. The National Historic Landmark nomination, a free PDF from the National Park Service, is the fullest written account of the house that exists. Marion itself is a public place and worth the detour: a Black Belt county seat with an intact courthouse square and a dense stock of nineteenth-century buildings, under an hour's drive west of Selma. There is no public transport to speak of in this part of Alabama; you will need a car, and services outside the town are sparse.