City Directories and History: JAMES SIMMONS HOUSE
Constructed circa 1760; altered 1840s
“Charlestonian James Simmons is believed to have built 37 Meeting Street in 1760. As originally constructed, the house follows a formal Georgian plan with a center hall dividing the four principal rooms on each floor. At Simmons’s death in 1775 the house became the home of Gov. Robert Gibbes. He and his family were forced to abandon the house during the British occupation of the city in the Revolutionary War and returned to find it heavily damaged. In the next century it became the home of builder and financier Otis Mills. It was during Mills’s occupancy in the 1840s that the facade of the house was greatly altered with the addition of the two projecting bays that are joined on the second floor of the house with an ornate cast-iron balcony. In 1862 the house became the headquarters of Gen. Pierre G. T. Beauregard, the commander of the Confederate forces at Charleston. Beauregard occupied the house until Federal shelling in the area forced him to shift his operations to a less vulnerable position at the northern end of the city.”
Information from: The Buildings of Charleston – J.H. Poston for the Historic Charleston Foundation, 1997
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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