Qualla: Senator Stephen Benton Elkins House

Senator Stephen Benton Elkins House: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Generic1139, CC BY-SA 3.0. It was a summer house. Three stories, towers and turrets, a flat-roofed central tower bracketed by a two-story portico - architect Charles T. Mott designed Halliehurst Mansion in 1890 as a warm-weather retreat for Senator Stephen Benton Elkins, who needed somewhere in the West Virginia mountains to escape the swampy heat of Washington. The mansion sits on a hillside above Elkins, the town his family helped create, with views of the valley below and the Allegheny peaks ringing it in. Today, however, no senator lives here. In 1923, the senator's widow Hallie Davis Elkins deeded the house and roughly 60 acres of grounds to Davis and Elkins College. Halliehurst became a college building. And a Queen Anne pile that might have been demolished or forgotten became, instead, the anchor of an entire campus.

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Senator Stephen Benton Elkins House: The Mansion as Statement

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Generic1139, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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...

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Senator Stephen Benton Elkins House: From Private Estate to Public School

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Generic1139, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 ...

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Senator Stephen Benton Elkins House: Restoration and Recognition

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Generic1139, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 restorationi...

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Senator Stephen Benton Elkins House: What the Hill Holds

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Generic1139, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 ...

Image: Generic1139 | CC BY-SA 3.0