The two-story frame house rose in the Greek Revival style that dominated the antebellum South -- columns, symmetry, classical proportions meant to signal permanence and authority. Despite being categorized in some records as a plantation home, Arlington was never a working plantation. No crops were produced here. It was a private residence, though one built and maintained by the labor of enslaved people. That distinction matters. Arlington sits in a landscape defined by the mythology of the plantation South, but its actual story is more specific: a wealthy man's house in a small county seat, constructed by hands that had no choice in the matter, in a style that borrowed dignity from ancient Greece.

In 1865, the Civil War arrived at Arlington's front steps. Union troops occupied the house during Wilson's Raid, the devastating cavalry campaign that swept through Alabama in the closing weeks of the conflict. Arlington became the staging point for one of the war's most symbolically charged acts of destruction: from here, Federal forces set out to burn the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, which had been training cadets for the Confederacy and operating a military hospital. The house itself survived -- a rare stroke of luck in a campaign that left much of Alabama's infrastructure in ruins.

After the war, Arlington passed through a succession of owners before landing in the hands of Robert S. Munger in 1902. Over the next twenty years, Munger dragged the old house into the twentieth century: plumbing, electric lights, and a second structure moved across the street to serve as kitchen, dining room, sun parlor, and sleeping quarters. He was also one of the first people in Birmingham to own a motor car. Munger's renovations kept Arlington livable at a time when many antebellum houses were falling into disrepair or demolition. The house outlasted its era because someone kept investing in it.

By the mid-twentieth century, Arlington's future was uncertain. In 1953, a citizens' group and the City of Birmingham pooled resources to purchase the property, transforming it from a private residence into a public landmark. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places since December 2, 1970, under the name Arlington (also known as the Mudd-Munger House), the home now serves as a decorative arts museum. Its rooms display nineteenth-century furniture, textiles, silver, and paintings. The landscaped gardens include a restored garden room used for special events. The ashes of former Birmingham mayor George G. Siebels, Jr. are interred on the grounds -- a quiet gesture linking the city's political history to its oldest surviving house.