Located across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, it is a complex of four formerly separate houses: the Blair House, Lee House, Peter Parker House, and 704 Jackson Place. Major interior renovations of these 19th-century residences between the 1950s and 1980s led to their consolidation. Blair House is one of several residences owned by the United States government for use by the President and Vice President of the United States; other such residences include the White House, Camp David, One Observatory Circle, the Presidential Townhouse, and Trowbridge House.

President Harry S. Truman and his family lived in the original Blair House from 1948 to 1952 during the renovation of the White House. Truman survived an assassination attempt there in 1950.

Strictly speaking, Blair House refers to one of the four existing structures that have been consolidated into a single building. The U.S. Department of State typically uses the name Blair House to refer to the entire facility, saying, “Blair House is the building officially known as the President’s guest house.” The General Services Administration refers to the entire facility as the “Presidential Guest House” and uses the name Blair House to refer to the historic portion of the Blair House building.

History

The Blair House was built in 1824; it is the oldest of the four structures that make up the Presidential Guest House. The original brick house was built as a private home for Joseph Lovell, the eighth Surgeon General of the U.S. Army. It was purchased in 1836 by Francis Preston Blair, a newspaper publisher and influential advisor to President Andrew Jackson, and remained in his family for the next century.

Francis Blair’s son Montgomery Blair, who had served as postmaster general in Abraham Lincoln’s administration, succeeded his father as a resident of the Blair House. At a meeting at Blair House on April 18, 1861, Francis Preston Blair Sr. delivered Abraham Lincoln’s offer the previous day to Robert E. Lee to command all Union forces in the approaching American Civil War. Later that year, the local conference decided that Admiral David Farragut would command the assault on New Orleans.

In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior erected a landmark at Blair House, becoming the first building to receive federally recognized landmark status; earlier landmarks were monuments and historic sites other than buildings. In 1973, it would be officially recognized as a National Historic Landmark.

Beginning in 1942, the Blair family began leasing the property to the U.S. government for use by dignitaries; the government immediately purchased the property the following December. The move was prompted in part by a request from Eleanor Roosevelt, who found the careless familiarity that Winston Churchill displayed during his visits to the White House repulsive. Churchill once tried to break into Franklin Roosevelt’s private suite at 3 a.m. to wake the president for a conversation.

For most of Harry Truman’s presidency, from 1948 to 1952, Blair House served as the residence of President Harry S. Truman and his family while the interior of the White House was being renovated. On November 1, 1950, Puerto Rican nationalists Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo attempted to assassinate President Truman at Blair House. The assassination was thwarted, notably by White House policeman Leslie Coffelt, who killed Torresola but was mortally wounded by him.

In 1859, Francis Preston Blair built a house next to the Blair House for his daughter Elizabeth Blair Lee and son-in-law Samuel Phillips Lee. The property became known as the Lee House.

The Peter Parker House, located at 700 Jackson Place, and the neighboring house at 704 Jackson Place were built in 1860. The Peter Parker House is so named because it was originally the home of physician Peter Parker. The U.S. government acquired both properties between 1969 and 1970, leasing them for offices. The Peter Parker House formerly served as the headquarters of the Civil War Centennial Commission and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and, like the Blair House, is a National Historic Landmark.

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History

In 1963, University President Douglas Knight commissioned Alden B. Dow to design the official residence. The modernist-style building was completed in 1966. The landscape design was by Dick Bell, who also designed Pullen Park in Raleigh, North Carolina. The house was named after Douglas Knight, who was president during the construction of the house and was the first president of the university to live in it. University presidents Terry Sanford and Nunnery O. Keohane also lived in Knight House. Knight House is 10,655 square feet and cost $379,971 to build. The house is a low house with ribbed copper roofs. The interior cladding of the house is made of bald cypress.

Located along Academy Road and Pinecrest Road, near the Duke Golf Course, the house covers an area of 436 acres in Duke Forest, near the West Campus of Duke University. It served as the official residence for university presidents from 1966 until 2004, when the original official residence, J. Deryl Hart House, was renovated for Richard H. Brodhead. The house is now used by the university as a guest house, conference room, and event space.

On April 6, 1968, a week-long silent demonstration began at Duke University, following the assassination of Martin Luther King. 450 students marched two miles from campus to Knight House to hand Douglas a list of demands. Knight is in favor of restructuring Duke University to make the institution less threatening to African-American students and staff. Demands included that Knight publish an ad in the Durham Morning Herald calling for a day of mourning for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that he raise the minimum wage to $1.60 for university employees, and that he resign from the then-segregated Hope Valley Country Club. The students also demanded that Knight appoint a committee of students, faculty, and staff to make recommendations on collective bargaining and union recognition at Duke. Knight hosted the students during the protest and invited them to his home, spending the night discussing the terms of their demands.

On September 15, 2012, the house was featured in Modernism in Duke Forest, a tour of six modernist houses in the Duke Forest neighborhood organized by Triangle Modernist Houses and the Durham Preservation Society.

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On November 9, 1879, a fire destroyed the previous Henry County Courthouse. Within three months, the county secured approval from the Ohio General Assembly to issue bonds to pay for the construction of a new courthouse, sheriff’s house, and jail. The jail side of the resulting brick building, designed to be fireproof, was built to separate male inmates from female inmates and young inmates from older inmates. Its twelve iron cells are connected by sixty-foot-long concrete-floored corridors. A report prepared by the state board of humanities in 1913 noted that the building was equipped with electricity, hot and cold running water; it was the responsibility of the sheriff to maintain the jail and provide its inmates with food. Some prisoners in Henry County were housed separately: many smaller jails, with a capacity of one to four cells, were maintained by villages in the county.

In the 1980s, the sheriff’s house and jail retained a high degree of integrity; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 24, 1981, in recognition of its architectural significance. In the late 1980s, the building changed its purpose: by then, rising crime rates had led to overcrowding in many jails in northwest Ohio. In early 1989, officials from five northwestern Ohio counties and the city of Toledo agreed to create a single regional jail complex. As Henry County was part of this consortium, the 1882 building was no longer used for incarceration purposes; instead, it was converted into offices for the sheriff’s department, a call center for the county’s 9-1-1 system, and office space for other county agencies. Today, the jail remains the location of the sheriff’s office.

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The Beehive House was built in 1854, two years before the neighboring Lion House (also Young’s residence) was built. Both houses are located one block east of the Salt Lake Temple and Temple Square on South Temple Street in Salt Lake City, Utah. The home was designed by Young’s son-in-law and Salt Lake Temple architect Truman O. Angell, who also designed the Lion’s Home. It was built of adobe and sandstone.

Young was a polygamist and the Beehive House was designed to accommodate his large family. The Beehive House also became his official residence as governor of the Utah Territory and president of the Latter-day Saint Church. After its completion, Young briefly shared the Beehive House with his eldest (and only legally recognized) wife, Mary Ann Angell (1803-1882), although she chose to make her home in the White House, a smaller residence on the property. Young’s first polygamous wife, Lucy Ann Decker Young (1822-1890), perhaps because of her seniority, became mistress of the Hive House and lived there with her nine children.

Beehive House served as the executive mansion of the Utah Territory from 1852 to 1855, and here Young entertained guests. The house is connected by a set of rooms to the Lion House. This suite included Young’s offices and his private bedroom, where he died in 1877.

Private use after Young’s death

After Young’s death, there was much controversy and litigation between Young’s heirs over what was Young’s property and what was the property of the church. Beehive House was among the objects in dispute; although eventually ownership was transferred to Young’s heirs. Beehive House was replaced as the executive mansion by the much more stately Gardeau House, which was briefly occupied by Young’s religious successors, John Taylor and Wilford Woodruff.

Beginning in the late 1880s, Young’s son, John W. Young, added a large Victorian-style addition to the rear of the building and significantly remodeled the old part of the house. The Young family lost the house when it was sold at auction in 1893 to pay off John W. Young’s debts.

John Beck, a successful miner and businessman, lived in the house for a short time before it was also sold to satisfy his creditors. It was later purchased by the Church and used as the official home of Church presidents Lorenzo Snow and his successor Joseph F. Smith, both of whom died in the mansion. Smith, who died in 1918, was the last president of the church to practice polygamy at the time of his death and shared the residence with his four wives.

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The idea of the building, as well as the place for the construction of the White House, belongs to the first American president, George Washington. Actually, on his orders, Americans began to build the whole of Washington – their new capital. In 1791, Washington signed the relevant act, which announced the competition for the construction of the “house of the president”. In the same year Washington laid a symbolic cornerstone in the foundation of the building, and a year later architect James Hoban won the competition for the best design of the White House.

Looking ahead, it should be said that the birth of the White House became a kind of symbol of the American nation, created by immigrants from different countries. In addition to the Irish architect, the house was built by Africans, natives of Scotland, Italy, Mexico.

The construction of the White House lasted 8 years (from 1792 to 1800). The object was delivered on November 1, 1800. It didn’t take long to build the building, considering that the White House turned out to be the largest building in America, and stayed in that status for a long time. In addition to Hoban’s ideas, the outline of the structure has traces of architectural activity of Washington himself, who made his own changes to the original project. In general, the building belongs to the so-called “early classicism”, or, in another way, Palladian architecture.

George Washington himself did not have to work in his brainchild, the first owner of the White House was the second president of the United States, John Adams, who moved here as a Residence. Since then, the building has fulfilled this function for all, without exception, U.S. presidents.

In 1814, during the Anglo-American War, the White House was set on fire, from which it was badly damaged. It managed to defend the walls, but the entire interior perished in the fire. The house underwent a major renovation, during which it significantly changed its original appearance, and its walls were painted with dazzling white paint. It is said that since then it began to be called the “White House”, before that it was called “President’s House” or “Presidential Palace”. In 1817, the White House was completely renovated, and its new owner was the 5th President of the United States, James Monroe. By the way, it was the same James Hoban who supervised the overhaul.

However, some researchers say that there are papers that confirm: the term “White House” is found already in 1809, that is, before the fire.

Officially, the current name was fixed by President Theodore Roosevelt, signing the corresponding document in 1901.

In 1902, Roosevelt initiated a major overhaul of the White House. During the renovation, the president’s residence was moved from the second floor to a separate building, now known as the West Wing. Roosevelt’s renovation was designed by the renowned New York architectural firm of McKim Mead and White.

Since 1909, the president’s workplace has been in the Oval Office, which is located in the left wing of the White House. Roosevelt’s successor, President William Howard Taft, became the first master of the Oval Office.

The fire set by the British was not the last in the fate of the mansion. In 1929, there was a short circuit in its West Wing and then a fire. Several rooms on the first and second floors of this wing burned.

During Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, many improvements were also made inside the residence so that he, as an invalid, could travel freely in a wheelchair.

Another remodeling of the White House

Fifty years after the Roosevelt renovation, the White House needed another renovation. President Harry Truman began a major overhaul of the building. All of the exterior walls were removed and new structures were erected in their place, with additional steel supports added. In 1952, 2 years after the renovation began, the Truman family returned to the White House. Truman, by the way, didn’t like it, and called it a “white glamor prison.”

Nowadays, the White House is just over 7 hectares of land, 6 stories, 132 rooms. A couple of upper floors are the personal residence of the presidential family, two middle floors are intended for various public purposes, and two basement floors are occupied by a variety of services. It has, for example, its own dental office, a good library, and a museum. Its exhibitions are available even to ordinary citizens and tourists, because there are regular excursions around the White House. True, they do not always let visitors in, and not in all rooms.

The famous Oval Office, the main workplace of the President of the States, is located in the West Wing of the building. Here is installed a massive desk, known to many by numerous photos and videos. Tradition says that this desk, as well as Abraham Lincoln’s bed (on which, by the way, he never slept), cannot be touched or moved.

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