Qualla: White House (Rock Hill, South Carolina)

White House (Rock Hill, South Carolina): Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bill Fitzpatrick, CC BY-SA 3.0. Ann Hutchison White did not want her town to become a town. In 1870, when the residents of the Catawba River settlement that would become Rock Hill petitioned for incorporation - their third try - she signed a counter-petition with six other landowners. Together they owned four-fifths of the proposed town's land, and they did not want to pay for paving streets they were perfectly content walking through as they were. They lost. Rock Hill incorporated on February 26, 1870. Ann lived another decade in the house her husband had built her - a house that had started as a one-room cottage in 1837, had grown to eighteen rooms by the time Sherman threatened to come through, and which today, after five generations of Whites, stands as a wedding venue and a museum.

Image: Bill Fitzpatrick | CC BY-SA 3.0

White House (Rock Hill, South Carolina): The Tailor and the Plantation Daughter

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mx. Granger, CC0. George Pendleton White was a tailor by trade. Ann Hutchison was one of sixteen children born to David Hutchison, one of the earliest white settlers to move onto Catawba Indian land along the river. They married on December 14, 1837. George built her a one-room cottage that year o...

Image: Mx. Granger | CC0

White House (Rock Hill, South Carolina): A Woman of Decisive Action

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bill Fitzpatrick, CC BY-SA 3.0. Ann had a reputation, in the words of one local history, as "a woman of strong conviction and decisive action." She ran the household and the family's affairs for the next thirty years. Her son James Spratt White went off to fight for the Confederacy in 1861. In February 1865 he ...

Image: Bill Fitzpatrick | CC BY-SA 3.0

White House (Rock Hill, South Carolina): Selling Off Pieces of the Town

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bill Fitzpatrick, CC BY-SA 3.0. After Appomattox, Ann needed cash. She began selling pieces of the family's land - hundreds of acres - to pay debts and keep the household going. One of her customers was Edwin Ruthven Mills, who bought parcels from her in 1872. Mills had led Rock Hill's Company E at the Battle o...

Image: Bill Fitzpatrick | CC BY-SA 3.0

White House (Rock Hill, South Carolina): Preservation and Present

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bill Fitzpatrick, CC BY-SA 3.0. Five generations of Whites lived in the house between 1837 and 2005. Each added rooms and outbuildings. The cottage grew into what is now a sprawling two-story, eighteen-room structure on a block of downtown Rock Hill - the kind of accreted vernacular building that records a fami...

Image: Bill Fitzpatrick | CC BY-SA 3.0