This house was on the site of Benedict Hall. Robert W. B. Elliott is the first name on the lease and he is likely to have built it. Mr. M.M. Benton, who was a Proctor, a salaried position for an old man in the early days, lived there. Mrs. A.C. Hall, a friend of Mrs. Sessums, bought it in 1897 and owned it for about a decade. She originally hailed from New Orleans.
The people who lived there longest were the Underwoods. Charles Underwood, an alumnus of 1903, was Commissioner of Buildings & Lands from 1922 to 1948 and Secretary to the Vice Chancellor from 1922 to 1938. Annie Underwood, was remembered for her sensitivity towards animal cruelty. In one instance, around 1948, a nation-wide fad of buying gaudily colored chicks for children at Easter had penetrated the University Supply store. Miss Underwood had made her visitation the very day of their arrival and said, “Send those birds back where they came from!” The entrepreneur had lost no time complying with her demand. “If those chicks are going to be squeezed to death by children, it won’t be in Sewanee,” she said. That same year Mr. Underwood died and the house was rented to various people for a few years. It was pulled down when Benedict Hall was built in 1963.
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 Unpublished manuscript, Sewanee: The University of the South, Sewanee.