Historic Jenkins House Restoration Nears Completion
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
The Jenkins House in Pendleton is coming back to life, not with fanfare so much as with the slow, deliberate motions of people who have decided that a place many once thought “couldn’t be saved” should, in fact, endure.
Sitting on a hill encompassing nine acres, the Jenkins House, looks down toward Pendleton the way an old doctor might study a familiar patient, alert to every change. The land was once part of a much larger tract, acquired in 1836 by Dr. William Lowndes Jenkins of Edisto, who came here not as a speculator but as a young physician looking for a place to practice medicine in the region he had grown to love.
“He bought this property after he finished at the Medical University of South Carolina, one of their first classes,” said Powell Hickman of the Pendleton Historic Foundation. “Upon graduation, looking for a place to open up his medical practice, he came back to the area he knew and loved, which is Pendleton.”
Jenkins’ mother, who was from Charleston (by way of Edisto) and who summered in Pendleton, had first tethered the family to this hillside, making the Upstate a seasonal refuge from the coast. Over time, the house, a quiet presence on the edge of town, became less a summer place than a constant one, holding a line of descendants who stayed on the property for roughly a century.
“The Hall family had lived here for a hundred years,” Hickman says. “And the last of that line was in ill health, still living here, and finally sold it to the Methodist Church.” By then, the house was slipping into what preservationists politely call “bad disrepair,” its age no longer charming, its future in doubt.
When the church looked at the sagging rooflines and tired timbers, it saw a liability, not a landmark.
“The Methodist Church had determined that the house couldn’t be saved,” Hickman recalls. “They were making plans for alternative uses for the property when we approached them with a proposal.” The proposal was audacious, especially for a small-town preservation nonprofit: if the Pendleton Historic Foundation could assemble the money, could it buy the nine acres for a community park and gardens—and restore the house.
“It was a huge reach for the historic foundation,” Hickman said. “We’ve been in existence here in Pendleton since 1964, but we’d never taken on a restoration of this magnitude since we restored Woodburn in the 1960s.” In other words, for more than half a century the foundation had been a careful steward, but not a gambler; the Jenkins House would change that.
The case for saving the property began, surprisingly, with trees.
“We knew we had a pristine piece of property in central Pendleton,” Hickman said. “It was determined there were probably three of the biggest White Oaks of the Upstate sitting on the property.”
Those oaks, and the hill they command, gave the group a way to talk about the site not just as a fragile old house, but as a landscape—a potential public commons rather than a private ruin. From the top, the view opens toward downtown Pendleton, a reminder that this quiet acreage has always been less isolated than it looks, its history braided into the town’s daily life.
“We were able to convince the South Carolina Conservation Bank to give us enough money to cover the majority of the cost for acquiring the property from the Methodist Church, “said Hickman. “Again, there was still disbelief that anybody thought we could restore the property, but we embarked about three years ago.”
Closing on the property, about three and a half years back, did not so much end a process as begin a more complicated one: the act of mending. The foundation brought in master carpenters from the coast—people well acquainted with houses that have seen storms and centuries—and paired them with Preservation South, the preservation firm whose project manager and consultant, Kyle Campbell, had already made a name on other upstate landmarks.
“Right now, the master carpenters from the coast and Preservation South, Kyle Campbell is our project manager and consultant,” said Hickman. “They’ve done projects all over the upstate.” Their previous work on Woodburn, another Pendleton-area house, won a statewide preservation award, an accolade that hangs over the Jenkins House project like both a standard and a promise.
“They did a restoration on Woodburn that won a statewide award,” said Hickman. “And I think we’ve got a product here that will probably be awarded preservation awards in the coming year.”
If the plan holds, the Jenkins House will not return as a sealed-off museum but as the centerpiece of a park and gardens open to anyone who wanders up the hill. The property, once the private realm of a 19th-century doctor and his descendants, are being reimagined as common ground, where the town’s past and present meet under those enormous white oaks.
For now, the final detail work goes on: workers making final changes to the house, preservationists puzzling over minute details that no longer seem trivial when a building’s story is at stake, volunteers interpreting a century and more of family life for a new generation.
“It just really is a unique property,” said Hickman, as if still half-surprised that the Pendleton landmark has been given this second chance.
