Mr. Bork, proprietor of a tin shop in the village, built this house. Along with other his other wares, he made torches for celebratory processions. The News in November 1876, stated that torchlight processions were the favorite way to celebrate. A letter, from June 11, 1874 reads, “They are making grand preparations for the coming meeting of Trustees in August. The Chapel is being enlarged 20 feet. They are getting torchlight processions and fireworks ready.”
Mr. J.A. Van Hoose, the next leaseholder, was here from 1877-1879. He was a graduate of the College and was a deacon, proctor and also became headmaster of the Grammar School. Van Hoose later became mayor of Birmingham. He also served as president of the Associated Alumni and a trustee. In 1879, Mrs. Mary Esther Huger of Charleston, bought the house. Mrs. Huger had twelve children. One daughter, Harriott Lucas Huger, married Dr. John B. Elliott, the University’s first health officer. Another married the Rev. Theodore Porcher.
The Mountain News reported in April 1879 that Mrs. Huger was to open her infant school and she also had a cottage in her yard for students. Mr. and Mrs. Huger supposedly did not talk for 20 years. However, when Mr. Huger died, his long-separated widow still dutifully followed the rigid Southern custom of going into mourning, wearing black “down to her heels,” and made no social calls all summer. Mrs. Huger died in 1898. Mrs. Blanche Hindman Cox bought this and the cottage in 1925 and lived there. Mrs. Jane Sidney Robison, the wife of a retired minister, bought the house in 1940 and lived there several years after her husband died in 1947.
Other owners included Horace Moore, Jeanette and William Hamilton, and Marshall and Sada Huey. Remington and Ramona Rose-Crossley are the current owners of the house as of 2001.
Chitty, A. B. (1978). Sewanee Sampler. Sewanee, Tennessee: The University Press.
Gailor, C. (1970). Old Sewanee Houses; The First Fifty-Years, 1860-1910. Unpublished manuscript, the University of the South, Sewanee.
Information from the Keystone Newsletter, November 2012.
...For all that and more, you'd need a torchmaker, and Charlotte Gailor tells us that in 1871, one "Mr. Bork who had a tin shop in the village (and who) made the torches for the processions" built a home which is now the green, clapboard cottage set back from the street and known as 327 University Avenue. Initially, as with several other modest structures built during those early years, the house consisted of two rooms with a hall between them, as well as a handsome staircase and bedrooms on the second floor. Kitchen and privy would have been separate structures built behind the house.
From 1877 to 1879 the house was owned by J.A. Van Hoose who came to the Theology Department of the University and served as Headmaster of the Grammar School. In 1879 Mrs. Mary Esther Huger bought the house. Mrs. Huger had a large family of her own, and when she decided, as so many ladies of Sewanee did at the end of the 19th century, to open a school, she built a cottage next door to her house for the purpose. The "infant school" opened in 1879; Mrs. Huger died in 1898.
Amazingly, the Huger House contains an intimate record of Mrs. Huger's residence. On the inside of the doors o a small cupboard in the front room on the second floor there is an inventory of linens, date June, 1882. One door lists four 'corded" sheets, eight cotton sheets "given by FKH"," and four "new unbleached sheets" for a single bed. Also noted are six blue-bordered towels and seven "odd" towels, two spreads each for double and single beds, and one "lined dimity spread." On the other door is a list of blankets and comforters. One of the comforters is calico-covered and another is covered in silk. there is one "extra large blanket," four red-bordered blankets and two "common blankets," all marked MEH or Huger, and one black-bordered blanket, also marked Huger--but that entry ends with the ominous note: "stolen."
These lists, written in pencil, are one hundred and thirty years old! In all that time, while the residents of this house changed more than seven times, the lists have remained, as clear as on the day Mary Esther Huger wrote them. For many years this house was owned by Bill and Jeanette Hamilton, whose son Webster had his room on the second floor. When Marshall and Sada Huey renovated much of the house during his years at the School of Theology (1998-2001), their two young sons played and slept in the room where this writing is and never so much as smudged it. Ramona and I, the present owners of the Huger House, keep games for family visits and souvenirs of our years on Guam in that cupboard, but we agree that Mrs. Huger's inventory is the most precious item there.--Remington Rose-Crossley