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Orleans Square: Champion-McAlpin-Fowlkes House

Irish architect Charles Blaney Cluskey is credited with the design of this mansion of scored stucco over brick. First to own and occupy the house was bank president Aaron Champion. During the Civil War, Champion hid his bank's gold in a well at the rear of the garden. After the war, he went to the well and recovered all but one ten dollar gold piece. Champion bequeathed his house to his only daughter, Maria Sophia, who had become Mrs. James W. McAlpin. She also inherited Hermitage Plantation from her father. (That's the plantation where Henry McAlpin manufactured Savannah grey bricks and whose foundry was first to produce cast iron in Savannah.) In 1939, Miss Alida Hooper (later Mrs. Hunter McGuire Fowlkes) acquired the house she had loved for years. Today the house belongs to the Georgia Chapter, Society of the Cincinnati. 230 Barnard Street.

--Visitor's Guide to Savannah

Orleans Square
1. Savannah Civic Center
Built on the site of the Bulloch-Habersham House, designed by William Jay (c.1820) and razed by the city of Savannah in 1914.
2. Champion-McAlpin-Fowlkes House
(1842) 230 Barnard Street. Two-story Corinthian columns on a masterpiece of Greek Revival architecture.
3. 114 and 116 West Hull Street
(1817), at the corner of West Hull and Barnard. With tin roofs and twin dormers, these houses were designed in 1817 by John Ash.

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