City Directories and History: PORCHER-SIMONDS HOUSE
Constructed circa 1856; altered 1890s, 1940s; rehabilitated 1983
“Cotton broker Francis Porcher built this house a few years before the War Between the States in the same Greek Revival style as neighboring dwellings. John C. Simons, brother of the builder of the Villa Margherita at 4 South Battery, renovated the house in a mix of Beaux Arts Classicism and Renaissance Revival detailing after 1894 with paired columns on the square portico and a double- tiered semicircular front piazza. All of the side piazzas were enclosed during the Second World War, when the house was used by the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence; John F. Kennedy occupied one of the offices. Once a single family dwelling, this house was converted into three condominiums in 1983.”
The Buildings of Charleston – J.H. Poston for the Historic Charleston Foundation, 1997
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The Porcher-Simonds House was built c. 1856 by Francis J. Porcher and enlarged and remodeled in the early 1890s by John C. Simonds. Porcher was a cotton broker and after the Civil War was president of the Atlantic Phosphate Company. He was delegate to the South Carolina Secession convention in 1860. Simonds, who purchased the house in 1894, was a native of Abbeville where his father, Andre Simonds, was a banker. The family moved to Charleston in 1865 and the elder Simonds organized the First National Bank. The younger Simonds was educated at Exeter and Yale and succeeded his father as president of the First National Bank. He sold the institution to the Peoples Bank in 1926. A friend later remarked that Simonds retired from banking at an auspicious time. The Simonds family sold the house in 1943. The house is depicted in an 1865 photograph as an Italianate style dwelling of two stories on a high basement with a pedimented center pavilion and masked piazza. Simonds remodeled the house in the Italian Renaissance Revival style popular in the 1890s, adding two front piazzas, one square and one semi-circular and a semi-oval wing on the south side of the house. The interior was also remodeled in the Renaissance Revival style, with an abundance of dark oak and mahogany finished woodwork, and two baronial staircases. (Stockton, unpub. M.S.) Courtesy of the Charleston Co Library
Other sources: Charleston Tax Payers of Charleston, SC in 1860-61, Dwelling Houses of Charleston by Alice R.H. Smith – 1917, Charleston 1861 Census Schedule, and a 1872 Bird’s Eye View of Charleston, S.C. The Hist. Charleston Foundation may also have additional data at: Past Perfect
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