1111 Oak St
San Francisco, CA 94117, USA

Abner Phelps House - National Register of Historic Places

Statement of Significance

The Abner Phelps House is generally considered to be the oldest residence in San Francisco. It was built in 1850-51 on a 160-acre plot at the foot of Buena Vista Hill. Old watercolors painted by C. Rogers in 1870 show the house in an isolated setting surrounded by hills. There are a number of stories concerning the early history of the Phelps House.

The traditional story, repeated in several written accounts, maintains that the house came from New Orleans. However, all of these accounts originate in information supplied by the Phelps family. Mrs. Shirley Phelps Robinson Rosenstein, the great-grandniece of Abner Phelps, maintains this story as the one told to her by her aunts and uncles (the children of Abner Phelps). She calls this "the romantic version of the story, and the one that I always believed. The architecture of the Phelps House, similar to New Orleans houses of that period, has reinforced the story that the house actually came from New Orleans. No evidence to support this story of the house's origin has been found either in San Francisco or New Orleans. As was discussed in Item 7, the nine pieces of wood which have been analyzed are of west coast of possibly New England origin. We must therefore conclude that the story was merely a family tradition which has gained credibility over several generations.

An entirely different account was published in the San Francisco Bulletin of October 14, 1924. This article states that John Middleton built the house in 1851 and sold it to Colonel Phelps, along with 160 acres, in 1852. The story goes on to report that Phelps "presented the land and the house to his bride as a wedding gift, and the gift deed was written in French so that she might fully appreciate it, for that was her language."-^ To investigate this story, descendants of John Middleton were interviewed. They are convinced that Middleton did indeed build the house, that he and his family lived in it for a short period, and that he then sold it to Colonel Phelps. This is what the Middleton family was told by their older relatives. Furthermore, Mrs. Camille Cochran, the great-granddaughter of John Middleton, believes that the wood for the house came from Maine because there were no sawmills here at that time. As discussed in Item 7, it has been shown that the majority of the wood in the structure is actually of local origin, and there were sawmills in the area as early as 1836. This research tends to discount the veracity of both the Maine and New Orleans origins of the Phelps House. However, it does not invalidate the theory that John Middleton built the house. Unfortunately, a search for deed documents concerning a transfer between Middleton and Phelps was unsuccessful; however, this should not be taken as conclusive evidence that a sale did not take place.

Whatever the origin of the Phelps House, both its history and architecture are of interest. Abner Phelps was born in 1804, a native of Orford, New Hampshire. He attended West Point, and fought as a colonel in the Mexican-American War. He lived in New Orleans for many years, where he was on the City Council,5 and in 1842 he was the Mayor of Lafayette, Louisiana”, which was incorporated into New Orleans in 1852. Phelps' first wife, the former Elizabeth B. Drew, died in New Orleans in 1844, at the age of 29.' Abner Phelps visited San Francisco in 1849, and in 1851 he married a young New Orleans woman, Charlotte Augusta Roussell. She joined him in San Francisco in 1852. The tradition is that Phelps wanted to provide an environment for his sheltered bride which would remind her of home, so he transported a house to San Francisco. Phelps was an attorney and worked in the Montgomery Block.

Abner and Augusta Phelps had six children, four boys and two girls. The Phelps children lived in the house their entire lives, with the exception of Abner Jr., who married and had his own family. Abner died in 1873 and Augusta died in 1893. The children lived together there until very advanced ages, when they all died within five years of one another in the 1930's.

Shirley Phelps Robinson Rosenstein, their grand-niece, had lived with her aunts and uncles and taken care of them as they grew older. Eventually the house was left to her with the stipulation that she sell it rather than try to keep up the family traditions alone. The house was sold to Charles L. Ayers, Jr., who was the son of an old acquaintance of Abner Phelps. This man owned it until his death in the early 1960’s. The Phelps House was acquired by the Preservation Group in 1975. It has since been moved to a new site as the focus of the Phelps Place Historic Plaza, and completely restored.

Architecturally the Phelps House is a unique example of a Southern type of architecture in San Francisco. In its raised first story, veranda, French windows, and dormers it is clearly derived from such colonial New Orleans houses as "Madame John's Legacy". The latter was in turn based on Acadian or French-Canadian prototypes. The raised floor, a formal convention in Acadian houses, assumed a functional purpose in flood-ridden Louisiana. Obviously, it had no function in San Francisco and was once again only a formal convention in the Phelps House. The house has a strictly symmetrical plan around a central hall which is indicative of its eighteenth-century sources. Contemporary ornament was imposed on this traditional form; Tuscan columns of the classical revival on the veranda, gothic revival in the dormers and the bargeboard.