Elihu Hall Bay House
76 Meeting Street • 1785
THE ALLEY ON ONE SIDE of this house, and a wide yard on the other, served as protective fire breaks. Single houses like this were often built of wood for coolness. The Duke de la Rochefoucault-Liancourt, commenting on the frequent preference for wood, and on the asymmetrical piazza, wrote that in Charleston, “persons vie with one another, not for who shall have the finest, but the coolest house”—a phrase that could still be used today albeit with a slightly different meaning.
The plain, carefully detailed piazza door-surround at 76 Meeting, and the attenuated Tuscan columns and pickets (rather than turned balusters), are probably among the city’s earliest examples of the Adam style. With the exception of the Brewton House at 27 King Street, no house in Charleston is known to have used this style until after the Revolutionary War.
The Hall House was built exclusively as a dwelling, but it retains the arrangement of a piazza door serving as a garden gate and as the entrance to the passage leading to a door in the center of the house. As the interior also shoes, Charlestonians preferred to continue having the front door to their residence open into the vestibule of the stair hall rather than directly into a main room of the house.
Judge Hall acquired this property in 1785. The original driveway ran from Meeting Street along the south side of the piazza. Directly behind the house was a small gate opening onto St. Michael’s Alley. The back corner of the piazza was enclosed.
The house was entirely separate from its outbuildings, which included a stable at the northeast corner of the lot and a kitchen midway between. The entire south half of the lot was used as a garden with ornamental beds on the street and rectangular plots farther back. •
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