Built at the height of the Gilded Age railroad-and-coal boom that the Davis and Elkins families helped run, the house announces wealth without quite shouting it. The three-story main block carries a hipped roof punctured by towers, turrets, dormers, and a confusion of chimneys. A wraparound porch hugs much of the first floor. A two-story portico with columns frames the central tower. The exterior reads as Queen Anne with elements of the more eclectic Late Victorian vocabulary, the kind of design wealthy Americans of the 1890s commissioned to evoke European castles without crossing the Atlantic. A service wing extends behind. Inside, the original floor plan reflected the rituals of a household with servants - drawing rooms, parlors, a dining room large enough for political dinners.

Hallie Davis Elkins outlived her husband by decades. When she made the decision in 1923 to give the mansion and 60 acres to Davis and Elkins College, she was committing to an idea: that a structure built for one family's leisure could become a place for hundreds of students. The college had been founded in 1904 on a smaller campus in south Elkins; the 1923 donation — with its condition that the college relocate permanently to Halliehurst — moved its center of gravity to higher ground by 1926 and gave it the architectural identity it still wears today. The mansion became administrative offices, classrooms, and event space. Around it, over the next century, the college added Liberal Arts Hall, science buildings, dormitories, and an arts center - the typical sprawl of an American liberal arts campus, organized around a Gilded Age core.

By the late twentieth century, the mansion needed care. Halliehurst and its gatehouse underwent a major restoration in 1990. Frantz Pugh of Elkins, the restorationist who led the effort, was named Volunteer of the Year by the college and designated heritage buildings restorationist and conserver of the fabric, formalizing his role as the long-term steward of the structure. The work returned details that had been lost to deferred maintenance and made the mansion serviceable for another generation of campus life. The Senator Stephen Benton Elkins House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, and it is a contributing property within the Davis and Elkins Historic District, itself a National Historic Landmark - the highest level of federal historic recognition.

Walk up the slope today and what you see is unusual for an American college: a campus organized around an actual late nineteenth-century estate, not a colonial-revival imitation of one. The original gatehouse still stands. Graceland Mansion, the home Senator Henry G. Davis built next door, is now a working hotel - the Graceland Inn - and the Robert C. Byrd Center for Hospitality and Tourism. Together, the two mansions and their outbuildings form a strikingly intact district that captures both the wealth that built this corner of West Virginia and the quieter generosity that ultimately turned that wealth into something a community could use. Stephen Benton Elkins died in 1911. His house, in a way he never imagined, kept working.