Daniel Heyward (Washington) House
87 Church Street • c. 1770–1772
This house was constructed by Daniel Heyward, the father of Thomas Heyward, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who grew up here. He acquired the property in 1770 and his widow inherited it in 1777. A coin dated 1772 found within a window frame provides an approximate date for its completion. The familiar name “Heyward-Washington House” commemorates George Washington’s stay here on his Southern tour in 1791.
Writing about this building in 1854, Charles Fraser specifically called it a “double house.” This designation was widely used in Europe before Charleston was founded, and in 17th-century England it described any house that was two rooms deep. Most double houses built in the American colonies had four rooms on each floor and were essentially country villas built in town.
This house is unique for a Charleston double house in that it is a semi-detached row house rather than fully detached like a country house (the attached building on the north side was constructed later). Row houses and double houses already existed when the single house was created, and the single house was not intended to be half of a double house, but rather a house detached from a row and standing by itself.
The typical Charleston double house had a central hall extending from the front door to the back door on the first floor, with stairs at the back of the hall. At the top of the stairs was only a vestibule, so that a large room could extend most or all of the way across the front of the house.
Most of the interior woodwork of this home survives intact, although the front-left room downstairs and the front of the hall were destroyed in 1883 when a bakery was installed on the ground floor. The dining room is fully paneled, and its overmantel has fretwork similar to a pattern usually reserved for decorating fine furniture.
In 1929, the Charleston Museum Director, Laura M. Bragg, convinced the trustees to acquire the house. She then employed Simons & Lapham to restore it and turn it into the city’s first house museum. Friends of Charleston architect Albert Simons had made an unrestricted contribution that was used for an option on the house, and the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings subsequently helped pay for it. In 1931, Simons & Lapham removed a storefront and designed a new southeast corner room for the first story, plus a new front hall.
The largely undecorated exterior (of beautiful English bond brickwork) is well proportioned enough to need only the embellishment provided by a brick cornice and a door surround that originally included pilasters.
E. Milby Burton, later Director of the Museum, assembled the finest collection of 18th century Charleston furniture for this house, including the Holmes bookcase, which is architectural in scale. On the basis of meticulous research, Emma B. Richardson designed a formal garden which was published in her pamphlet on plats showing gardens. •
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In the 1930s, probably well before then and up into the 1940s, there was a three-feet high brick wall on each side of the front steps. I think that it was perhaps removed because passers-by (certainly NOT neighborhood children) threw so much trash behind them.