Picture the Greene–Marston House, better known to locals as Termite Hall. The house began as a one-and-a-half-story cottage built by the Greene family about 1851; you can still sense that modest beginning folded into the house you see. In 1903 Martin Van Heuval raised the scale here, building a much larger two-and-a-half-story Late Victorian structure and incorporating the earlier cottage as a wing.
The house was remodeled again in 1910 by William Syson. In 1919 the property was sold to Regina DeMouy Rapier after the DeMouy house was destroyed in a fire, and many of her DeMouy, Rapier, and Marston relatives lived here during that period. The familiar nickname Termite Hall came in the early twentieth century after the Marston sisters, Adelaide and Eleanor, found a porch rail disintegrate beneath them and discovered an infestation of termites.
Under Adelaide Caroline Marston Trigg the house became locally renowned as a literary gathering place; in 1941 she co-founded Mobile's The Haunted Book Shop. Picture Adelaide Marston Trigg's literary gatherings spilling onto this porch, where the Late Victorian façade still wraps the older cottage wing beneath it.