250 Moss Avenue

City Directories and History:  The Calhoun – Gilbert House is an excellent example of the evolution of a residence from a mid-nineteenth century one-

story house featuring elements of the Greek Revival style to an early twentieth century two-story house featuring elements of the Classical Revival style. The house was built ca. 1856 for Edward Calhoun and was originally a one-story raised cottage featuring a first floor and attic over an above-ground brick basement. It was

designed by architect William Jones of Atlanta. The house is a weatherboard-clad frame residence featuring a full-width one-story hip roofed porch that is intersected at center by a projecting pedimented portico. Attached to the rear is a full-width, hip-roofed wing which features decorative metal shingles and engaged porches. The house is also associated with Edward Calhoun (1809-1862), his son Edwin Calhoun (1839-1917), and Albert Gibert (1859-1938), prominent Abbeville District and McCormick County planters and businessmen. Calhoun’s son Edwin, who served in the Confederate States Army inherited the property after his father’s death and farmed here after his return. Albert Gibert purchased the house ca. 1908 and soon enlarged it to two stories, adding four bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, a back hall and stair, and two side porches. Outbuildings contributing to the character of the property include a frame garage, a two-story frame cattle barn, and a board-and-batten smokehouse, hay barn, and potato barn. Listed in the National Register March 12, 1996.

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Further Information: The house was built ca. 1856 for Edward Calhoun and was originally a one story raised cottage featuring a first floor and attic over an above-ground brick basement. It was designed by architect William Jones of Atlanta, who also designed Long Cane Associated Reformed Presbyterian Church and several Abbeville District residences after moving to this area shortly before the Civil War. Calhoun, a cotton planter, owned 58 slaves in 1860, and his land holdings boasted a cash value of $8984 that year with 575 acres of improved land. The farm produced 49 four-hundred-pound bales of ginned cotton, as well as

1200 bushels of Indian corn and smaller amounts of wheat, oats, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, peas and beans. It also produced butter, wool, wine, and hay, and its livestock included twelve milk cows, twelve other cattle, fifty-one sheep, sixty pigs, three horses, and twelve mules.  Calhoun’s son Edwin, who served in the confederate States Army as a private in the 6th South Carolina Cavalry and was severely wounded in the face in 1864, inherited this property after his father’s death during the war and farmed here after his return to Willington. Calhoun’s farm, a more modest one than his father’s had been, boasted a cash value of $2500 in 1870 with 160 acres of improved land, most of it devoted to cotton. The farm produced thirteen four-hundred-fifty-pound bales of cotton, as well as two hundred bushels of Indian corn and smaller amounts of winter wheat, oats, Irish potatoes, and sweet potatoes. It also produced butter, and its livestock included six milk cows, twenty other cattle, nine pigs, a horses, and three mules. An obituary tribute to Calhoun noted that “for many years he followed his life-work of a planter in the Monterey section [of Abbeville County]” before moving to Abbeville around the turn of the twentieth century.  Dr. William Edwin Link, a Willington physician who was educated at the Medical College of Georgia and also served in the Confederate States Army as assistant surgeon in the 27th South Carolina Infantry, acquired the house and surrounding farm from Edwin Calhoun through his wife, Louisa Catherine Harris, who was a relative of the Calhouns. Though Link undoubtedly farmed the property, he was best known as a doctor, and an obituary tribute to him claimed, “he gave his services gladly and freely wherever they were needed. He literally ‘went about doing good. ” Albert Gibert purchased the house ca. 1908 from Link, and soon enlarged it to two stories, adding four bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, a back hall and stair, and two side porches. Gibert graduated from the Carolina Military Institute the Reconstruction-era institution that replaced The Citadel from 1873 to 1882 while the United States government kept the South Carolina Military Academy closed in 1879. He, like the Calhouns and Link before him, was primarily a cotton planter, but also grew Indian corn, Irish potatoes, and sweet potatoes, and raised sheep as well. An obituary tribute to Gibert called him “a planter for many years successfully conducting the affairs of a vast plantation,” but also referred to him as “a man of modest demeanor, interested in historical affairs,” and noted that he and his wife, Helen McMakin Gibert, “dispensed a gracious hospitality, entertaining many from all sections of the state” at their home. The property passed to the Giberts’ son James after Albert Gibert’s death; at James’s death in 1945 the house and surrounding property were sold out of the family.   (NR FIle Data / SC Dept. of Archives and History)

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