Picture this Point neighborhood mansion as it looked when the Rhett family summered here. 1820 mansion in the Point neighborhood of Beaufort, part of the Beaufort Historic District. This 6,000-square-foot Federal and Greek Revival house was built around 1820 as a summer home for Thomas Moore Rhett and his wife, Caroline Barnwell.
Originally it held eight rooms and rested on a masonry basement, with porches on the south and west sides and Greek Doric columns supporting the upper and lower porches. The front faces the Beaufort River, a constant presence in the house’s story. Rhett owned a plantation on the Ashepoo River where enslaved African Americans lived and worked; in 1850 he ran an advertisement in The Charleston Mercury offering a fifty-dollar reward for the apprehension and delivery of a slave named Sampson.
During and after the Civil War the house’s role shifted: after the war it served as a hospital for injured soldiers. Thomas Rhett died on December 26, 1860. Changes were made to the house in the late 1800s as it evolved into today’s inn.
Picture those Doric columns still holding up the porches that Caroline Barnwell once knew, facing the Beaufort River.