Two more houses complete our walk around Warren Square.
The William Parker House built 1806-1809 sits on the square’s northwest corner at 324-326 East Bryan St. It was built for Dr. William Parker, 1766-1838, who volunteered to visit houses of both black and white families living in Warren and Washington Wards to register births and deaths for the newly formed Georgia Medical Society, according to Nancy Leavitt in a paper for Armstrong State College in 1978. The paper is filed in the Lane library of the university named for the first Mills B. Lane.
Parker’s grandparents had arrived with Gen. James Oglethorpe in 1733.
But perhaps the name of the house should be the Louisa Guerard McAlister Parker House since Dr. Parker acquired the land by marrying the widow Louisa in 1804.
The east side of the house, 326 E. Bryan, was also more recently the home of Noel Florence and Jo Stanley, a nationally known architect and the chairman of the Savannah Historic Board of Review when Mills Lane IV served on the board and the Jepson Art Center was going through the approval process at the turn of the century.
We can assume the Parker House had an easier time than the Jepson with the Review Board process when Mills was restoring the house from 1991-92. It had been converted from a single family house with a center hall plan to a double house by shifting the front windows and adding a second door and passage in the 1890s. Mills’s work 100 years later was awarded a 1993 Historic Savannah Foundation Project award.
Across the street at 404 East Bryan sits a John Eppinger House built from 1821-23 originally on West Perry Street. It was part of a migration of houses Anne and Mills Lane Jr. orchestrated when the City of Savannah was clearing the area for the new Civic Center. They restored the house in 1967-68.
We will walk around the block to Bay Street to talk about the other Eppinger House that the Lanes moved and turned into their own home in the next post.
Rexanna Keller Lester is working on a book about Mills Bee Lane IV and his preservation legacy.
For more on architecture and the history of the South, click on the “Books” tab at the top of the page.
