The Belle Without A Beau

By Beth Yarbrough

She was the belle without a steady beau for most of her 185 years until the city of St. Marys, Georgia finally stepped in and took her hand.

Orange Hall was built in the year 1830. Her owner, Horace Pratt, was a transplant from the North, having just graduated from Yale and the Princeton Theological Seminary. He came South and organized the First Presbyterian Church in St. Marys – intending to build this home for his family and live happily ever after.

Before he could build, however, he sadly lost his wife. After remarrying, he did begin construction – hiring Massachusetts builder Isaac Slayton to do the work – but was forced to leave St. Marys shortly afterward in order to fulfill a contractual obligation to teach at the University of Alabama.

Pratt died a few years later, which opened the door for the long string of secondary suitors who all briefly held ownership or occupancy of Orange Hall before moving on. By my count, there were ten of them. They included a military general, a wealthy planter, a noted educator, the Union Army, a real estate speculator, a judge, and an automobile tycoon, among others.

Adding insult to injury, the house was briefly seized by Camden County for tax delinquency, then reinstated to the owners, later turned into an apartment house and later still, a corporate dormitory for mill workers.

As the architectural jewel of St. Marys, and as one of the finest and earliest examples of Greek Revival architecture in the South, the city of St. Marys acknowledged the importance of Orange Hall and purchased the house in 1965. Happily, that relationship is the one that finally took root.