Interested in (notional) secret tunnels, log cabins or the glitterati of the Columbus of yesteryear?
All of that, plus an origin story involving a log cabin, can be found at Hickory Sticks, the historic home at 1206 Seventh Ave. N.
The home, formerly owned by Richard Johnston Jr. and his wife, Julia Johnston, became the property of Novastar Mortgage Inc. on Feb. 22, 2007. LLG MS LLC became trustee of the home on March 17 of this year, and will auction the home on the courthouse steps May 6.
The house, which is atop a hill and mostly screened from view by trees, has a long and storied history dating back to Columbus’ earliest days and was home to some of its most distinguished citizens, according to local historian Rufus Ward.
Ward estimated the house, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was built sometime between the middle 1820s and early 1830s and was originally a double pen log cabin. He said that it was probably built by a man named Andrew Weir, although past Pilgrimage booklets have said Mayor William Moore built it.
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“(Weir) got the patent for the land in 1834,” he said. “A lot of times people had been living on the land before they got a patent for it. He possibly could have been living on that site by 1830. It’s possible that Andrew Weir built the house.”
It was built as a so-called double pen log cabin, Ward said, which means that two separate units are built side-by-side and connected by a breezeway. It originally sat on 160 acres.
Weir sold it to Robert Haden, one of Columbus’ early mayors, and it was Haden who probably enlarged and remodeled the house into the familiar Greek revival style.
“There are two or three houses on Southside that look like Greek Revival that actually have a log structure in the middle of them,” Ward said. “If you had a log house it was common to enlarge it and make it into a fancier house.”
Prominent local judge J.A. Orr bought the house in the 1840s and added to the second story, Ward said. After Orr it passed to one of Columbus’ most prominent citizens: Gen. S.D. Lee.
“After the Civil War he lived there at one point,” Ward said. “Lee’s son Blewitt gave the southern part of the property to the city of Columbus, and it’s now Lee Park.”
The changes in Hickory Sticks show Columbus’ growth during the 19th century.
“It started as a log cabin, and its changes show the development of Columbus from a frontier settlement into a real town,” he said. “New log construction was banned inside the city in 1830. It was outside the city limits, but you get into a situation where people are building houses conform simply out of wanting to have a house that looks like a nice house. It’s simple peer pressure.”
Hickory Sticks is one of the oldest surviving houses in Columbus, Ward said.
“It’s so closely tied to Columbus,” he said. “Weir was on the school board at Franklin. Judge Orr was a prominent judge. S.D. Lee lived there. The people who lived in that house were some of the most prominent people in Columbus, who made Columbus what it is.”
Robert Ivy grew up in the home. His parents, Robert and Frances, are the ones who christened it “Hickory Sticks.”
Ivy said they bought it in about 1950 from two brothers with the last name Stanley, and it was not in good shape then.
“They were bachelor brothers and set in their ways,” he said. “He and his brother actually cut wood in the hall in the house, on the floor. Mr. Stanley took a liking to the fact that a young boy would get to grow up in the house, and a member of my family had helped save a member of his family’s life.”
Those connections led the Stanley brothers to sell the property to Ivy’s family, he said. Ivy’s father sold off some of the surrounding property, on which the surrounding houses were built.
“He just focused on about four acres,” he said. “They hired a contractor and an architect and worked on (the house) for a significant amount of time.”
One of the parts of the original log cabin had “fallen into complete disrepair” and had to be torn down, he said.
“There’s only one log room that remains, and it’s on the second story,” he said. “The logs were still exposed. They had primitive furniture in the room like you would have seen in a house from the 1820s. The room below it was plastered.”
It was a great place to be a child, Ivy said.
“There was a barn in the backyard, and my mom built a small structure in the back yard that was a bookstore,” he said. “There were pine and hardwood forests, grapevines, there were places to squirrel away and hide.”
The house’s cellar is carved out of the clay and is unfinished, he said.
“It was used for food storage and wine storage in the pre-refrigeration days,” he said. “There was always a legend there was a tunnel down there that was an escape route. We spent a lot of time searching, but we never found it.”
According to auction.com, the home will be auctioned at the Lowndes County Courthouse on at 1 p.m. May 6.
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