City Directories and History: (Keitt-Whaley-Pearlstine House) This house is an excellent example of an Upcountry farmhouse, or original I-House, in the lower part of the state. It combines several features of the Greek Revival style, particularly in the interior detail. Of four large plantation houses in the general area, Puritan Farm is the only one not destroyed by fire. The house is a large white two-story clapboard frame structure with a pedimented second floor porch addition and two connecting rear wings, all set upon a raised basement. The façade presents two deeply separated vertical planes, a porch extends across the entire first-story front and rests upon the raised basement, and six square columns support its sloping roof. Two parallel gable roofs over the rear wings and the gabled roof of the pedimented second story porch offset the gabled roof of the main two-story front section of the house. The main block of the house is one-room deep with a central hall on each floor. All mantels are original. The Reverend Jacob Wannamaker built the home between 1820 and 1825 for Dr. and Mrs. George Keitt. The house also was the residence of Congressman Lawrence M. Keitt, a leader of the South Carolina secessionist movement. Keitt was born in this house in 1824 and maintained it as his residence until his death in 1864. One of the original outbuildings, the plantation commissary, is still standing. Listed in the National Register July 25, 1974.
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Doric frieze, with alternating triglyphs and metopes. A taenia beneath the triglyphs features wooden guttae. The courthouse has a hipped roof. A cupola at the crest of the roof is octagonal, painted white, with open arcaded sides, an entablature, and an octagonal dome of pointed profile, sheathed in metal and crowned with a wind vane. The cross-axis plan courthouse was built to serve the newly formed Calhoun County, named for South Carolina Statesman John C. Calhoun. The county seat of St. Matthews donated $20,000 toward construction costs for the courthouse and two prominent local residents donated the construction site. Interior details are restricted to the courtroom, where they are used to reinforce the authority of the judge, as representative of Law, Order, Justice, and Calhoun County. Listed in the National Register October 30, 1981.
