Portrait by Thomas Story Officer.

THE ARCHIVES TELL A STORY: Govt. St. Presbyterian Church (1968), p. 202 says that the records of the building committee of the church are incomplete BUT that H. Hitchcock & J.K. Collins signed a notice in the newspaper in Dec. 1835 "H. Hitchcock, J.K. Collins, Building Committee" and at the same time in Dec. other notices for Barton Academy's construction appeared in the paper with notices signed "H. Hitchcock, WILLIS ROBERTS, J.K. Collins, and G. Mordecai (the first three of which were officers in this church)."

112 South Conception Street, Mobile, Alabama. Home of Willis Roberts, founder of the Mobile Chronicle newspaper, and later home of Col. John Forsyth, editor of the Mobile Register. The Roberts-Mather-Tardy-Forsyth house was built circa 1824-27 by Willis Roberts and given to his elder daughter Olivea Mather in September 1827, according to her nephew, Mobile mayor Harry Pillans (Mayor Pillans wrote this on 1920s-30s flier with a black & white picture of the Tardy-Thorp house in possession of his granddaughter, Mary Pillans Van Antwerp). Mrs. Mather sold it to Balthazar Tardy and still later it passed to Col. John Forsyth. This house stood at the northwest corner of Church Street & Conception Street, now the back corner of the county courthouse. The house across the street still stands and backs up to Christ Church.

At one time Col. John Forsyth lived at Shell Cottage on Old Shell Road, adjoining the property of Willis Roberts' granddaughter Jennie Roberts Eberlein. Shell Cottage was afterwards home of R.V. Taylor and wife Helen Buck Taylor who later acquired the Roberts home at 910 Government Street.

The Alabama Historical Quarterly, Spring 1956; Original Tracts vic Montgomery AL, Willis Roberts of GA. Online at:
http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/compoundobject/collection/quarterly/id/768/rec/1

A press release from the Mobile Historic Development Commission (Mobile Press Register, March 1, 1992, p. B-4), referring to the Endangered Properties List, states that 910 Government Street was built in 1840.

Legends seem fairly common with the area's older houses that their service wings supposedly predate the main buildings; these nearly always seem to be contemporary at least, if not older. The same is true of 910.

Registered architect T.B. Selby stated unequivocally that the north wing predates the main house by 10 to 20 years, as evidenced by two exterior paint layers predating the lowest paint layer on the main (1854) house, exterior siding inside the walls on the north wing rather than the west wing and main block, and numerous other points, including wide floor boards, wooden pegs, and the hipped roof on the creole-style north wing. The house has three attics, the smallest of which is a cricket adjoining the wing to the main house and rising over the original southside roofline of the original north wing to deflect water away from the house. "No one would ever build an addition with a hipped roof that dumped water against the rear house and rear galleries, even contemporaneously with the 1854 house by mistake. It obviously predated it."

Articles giving the 1840 date allude to Mayor Harry Pillans' statement that his grandfather Dr. Roberts built the older part of the house. Some of the Pillans family stated it was constructed after his return from Texas, while others give the date as 1837, prior to the move to Texas. The 1992 article adds, however, "There are rear wings from the turn of the century and the 1920s" giving deference to Elizabeth Barrett Gould's incorrect dating of the wings erroneously based on incomplete Sanborn fire maps.


THE ATLAS OF MOBILE, by G.M. Hopkins, published in Baltimore in 1878, shows the north side of Government Street: number 904 (Adrian Dure), 906 (Palmer J. Pillans),908 (E.P. Gaines), and 910 Mary T. Robets (sic). Mary T. Roberts sold 908 Government Street to Dr. Edmund Pendleton Gaines in 1875, twelve years after her husband's death. Dr. Gaines' widow, Mary Jane Toulmin Gaines, sold it to Joel Roberts' nephew Harry Pillans in 1892.

The 1878 drawing shows the north and west wings of 910 Government Street but includes neither the antebellum kitchen house nor the northeast dependency which were both demolished in 1940, according to R. Taylor Abbot who pointed out the salvaged construction material used in the 1940 kitchen and bathroom alterations. Nor are those structures shown on any of the Sanbourn fire maps.

The house at 910 Government Street is comparatively well documented. The original building ledger of Joel A. Roberts is preserved at the house today showing every nail, hinge and board that went into building the home. Joel Roberts was his own contractor, utilizing the expertise of his brothers Reuben and Seth Roberts and slave labor. Most of the lumber was purchased from Thomas Tabb Bolling, who then lived at 907 Government Street.

Helen Buck Taylor Abbot said that she was six years old when she moved to 910 Government Street in 1897, that her father installed electricity in the house that year and in 1905 added the east wing. (This wing was built on a vacant lot deeded to Mary Taylor Bolles Roberts from her mother Elizabeth Bolles in 1855 after the Robertses had moved into the new house adjoining it in October 1854.) The tax records, like most of the other records regarding the house, are contradictory and confusing and have never seemed completely correct but Elizabeth Barrett Gould's abstracts of the jumbled 1905 tax records shows the house assessed early in the year as one house and lot and and then later in the year assessed as two separate houses on two lots, five and six west of Broad. All subsequent tax assessments to date show one house on two lots and the two have never been joined; to date, the owners pay for two lots.

Architectural and photographic documentation suggest that R.V. Taylor also extensively remodeled or rebuilt the west wing after damage by fire. A 1939 aerial photograph made before the kitchen house and northeast dependency were demolished show a tiny courtyard surrounded on three sides by the north wing, east wing and the northeast wing or dependency.

The last major alterations were made in 1940 when the northeast dependency was demolished, containing garage and servants' quarters along with the old kitchen house, and a new garage built. The north wing galleries were widened and enclosed with the addition of three new bathrooms, nearly doubling the size of the north wing, and bringing the total to seven bathrooms and square footage at nearly 10,000 sq. ft. including the attic floor rooms. Mrs. Abbot and the Pillans family next door always called the north wing "the old part of the house" and "the old wing," which is appropriately descriptive, it being of mortise and tenon construction and wooden pegs.

According to Helen Buck Taylor Abbot's son, Rev. R. Taylor Abbot, his mother said "They moved the kitchen into the warming kitchen around 1890 and then set the house on fire, so that was why they had to mortgage it." Shown in the Atlas of Mobile by G.M. Hopkins (Baltimore, 1878) more accurately than in the Sanborn fire maps, the north wing is actually much older than 1878 according to Abbot statements and Pillans family records, as well as the judgment of every architectural historian who ever performed onsite inspection and concurred that the north wing predates the west wing to which it is attached and is at least as old as the original 1854 house if not predating it. It does not appear on the 1840 Lewis Troost map. Analysis of paint layers shows two earlier exterior paint layers, gray and taupe, on the north wing that are not found on the main block which was originally painted butterscotch.

To some, the pressing question is whether Willis Roberts built his Mobile house in 1837 before his Texas adventure or upon his return in 1840 and on the same plans used to build the house in Galveston in 1838; whether the Mobile house was the precursor model or the perfected finale.

Menard House (1838), Galveston, Texas. The frame of the house was probably shipped from Mobile, Alabama by Willis Roberts and his sons who were builders in Galveston at this time.