Gray House Book

[Nina Zahra]

A unique Arlington property, the Harry Gray House was built by formerly enslaved man Harry W. Gray. It is a rare example of the brick rowhouse in the Italianate style and is the only surviving building of its type in Arlington. The Gray House represents the monumental shift from slavery to middle-class citizenship for African Americans in the decades following the Civil War.

The Gray House retains sufficient integrity of design, workmanship, materials, location, and feeling despite the tremendous mid-to-late-20th-century growth in Arlington. It is also noteworthy because it represents the work of an amateur builder. Gray gleaned the skills and workmanship while he was enslaved at Arlington House and as a freedman working in brickyards.

First we made some large changes to the room. We painted the walls gray and replaced the doorknobs. We also pulled up the carpet and installed laminate flooring. The flooring project took a few weeks to complete and turned out to be a labor intensive process due to the uneven concrete below the carpet. Thanks goodness I was pregnant and had a good excuse to get out of that one!

After our son was born, we quickly learned middle of the night diaper changes are a bit difficult in the dark. To solve this issue we added a huge light bulb over the changing table. It is perfect because it is just bright enough to see what you are doing without blinding you when you are half asleep at 2:00 in the morning. Plus, it is a crazy giant light bulb which makes it a fun addition to the room.

I feel like our biggest challenge was making sure we were keeping a cohesive look throughout the whole room. With each DIY project we started and each new decorative piece we added to the outdoor themed nursery, we spent a lot of time beforehand planning and probably over analyzing.

We could not find a rocking chair in the style and color we liked that was in our price range. Nursery rocking chairs are expensive. To solve this dilemma, we purchased a normal chair in the color and style we liked and Brent removed the old legs. Then he built and attached his own rocking base. It turned out awesome.

We added labels to give the appearance that camping gear is being stored in the drawers to match with the outdoor themed nursery but the truth is those drawers are fake! They are actually doors hiding all of the diaper changing necessities including a diaper pail.

When you have a newborn it feels like you need to have at least eight arms to successfully do everything you need to do. To make things easier during diaper changing time we created this simple wall storage solution.

2 YEARS LATER UPDATE: Where there were blankets on the bottom shelf there are now toddler shoes and a basket for hats but other than that this piece is still going strong! I love how the limited space forces me to stay on top of his clothes and make sure I only have the size that currently fits folded in the baskets.

The reading nook tent was the last project we built for the room. We wanted to include a playful piece that could be a cozy place for Connor to curl up and read once he gets older. What is an outdoor themed nursery without a tent?

I love turning on the twinkle lights and the little lantern at night when the house is quite and rocking him to sleep. It feels dreamy in this room, like we are transported to another land that is just our own, far out in the middle of nowhere.

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The Antram-Gray House, which serves as the visitor center for Roger Williams National Memorial, is located at the northeast corner of the park at the corner of North Main and Smith Streets.

It was built around 1730 on the corner of Towne (now North Main) and Smith Streets with property adjacent to the cove for a wharf. This portion of the house is one of the few structures in Providence that survive from the city's earliest period of commercial and maritime development. It is considered one of the oldest commercial buildings in Providence.

Originally built as a residence and distillery, the structure has seen many uses: apartments, grocery & dry goods shop, dressmaker's shop, hairdresser salon, restaurant, barber, and the Thomas B Gray Watch Shop. Constructed as a distillery, it was one of many in Rhode Island. Rum was a key commodity used in the trans-Atlantic slavery trade. Nearly 70% of the slavery voyages to leave the English Colonies for West Africa sailed out of Rhode Island.

When the National Park Service took ownership of the building in 1974, it was moved approximately 40 feet to the south of its original location to enable Smith Street to be widened. Today, the Antram-Gray House houses the National Memorial visitor center, interpretive exhibits, and staff offices.

The story of The Jam is an indelible part of Allman Brothers Band lore: March 23, 1969, a Sunday afternoon on which all but one of the founding members jammed for hours in the living room of a big house in Riverside.

They had come from different hometowns and a complicated, overlapping series of top-notch bands. They'd jammed together before, and with others, sometimes playing for the hippies in nearby Willowbranch Park.

The story goes that, as the jam ended, Duane blocked the door and proclaimed, "Anybody in this room who thinks they're not going to play in this band will have to fight your way out of here." Or something to that effect.

Fifty years later, a state historical marker is going up in front of the old house where the jam is believed to have taken place, a marker with a simple title at its top: BIRTH OF THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND.

It's owned by Dennis and Mildred Price, who, working with Bob Kealing, a Florida author and historian, submitted documentation about the Gray House and the jam to the state's Historical Marker Council.

Approval came in September, and just this week the Prices took delivery of a large, 160-pound aluminum sign, an official historical marker. Under the title, it has a description, on the front and back, of the history of the Allman Brothers Band, starting in that old house on Riverside Avenue and continuing until the group was disbanded in 2014.

Still, the jam that took place there was a momentous event in their history, said Kealing, who has written books on Elvis Presley in Florida, on Flying Burrito Brothers singer and one-time Bolles student Gram Parsons, on Jack Kerouac and his Orlando connections, and on Brownie Wise, the early promoter of Tupperware.

Duane, though, who'd grown up in Daytona Beach, knew someone who could. He called his baby brother Gregg, who was in Los Angeles, making music there. Come back to Florida, he told him. I've got a band.

Oakley, Betts and Wynans lived in the Gray House, which had been broken into five apartments. Gregg crashed there too, and as he wrote in his autobiography, quickly set about writing songs for the new band. The first: "Whipping Post," which he came up with in the middle of the night while staying in an upstairs room in what he called "a huge place that must have been built around the turn of the century."

He wrote that he couldn't find a paper and pencils in the dark, so he wrote the song down on an ironing board cover with charcoal from matches that he lit. His description fits the Gray House exactly, says Price, who shows the room where the singer must have stayed.

The Prices bought the house in 1986, though it needed a lot of work. It had been a rooming house for decades, as it was during the Allman jam. They found about the connection to the band in 1999, when a fan dropped by to see the place.

He too is a fan of the band, so he started researching, going through hundreds of articles to find out what happened in those crucial few weeks when the Allman Brothers Band came to life in his house.

"I wanted to prove that jam happened here, and set the record straight," Price said. "I would like to see Jacksonville recognized as the place where the Allman Brothers were born, where it all began."

Known as the Robert P. Dodge House, the circa 1850 residence is named after its first owner, an important merchant and shipper who was a consulting engineer for the C&O Canal. Dodge hired Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux to design the home.

Downing, better known as an American landscape architecture pioneer who laid the groundwork for Central Park in New York, was also a sought-after architect in his time. Downing and Vaux designed the house in an Italianate style, but subsequent alterations have stripped it of most of those features.

Gray, who served as White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush and as U.S. ambassador to the European Union from 2006 to 2007, was an influential Republican strategist and fundraiser. He died in 2023.

The four-level, 11,000-square-foot residence has eight bedrooms, seven full bathrooms and two half bathrooms. It has 12-foot ceilings, an elevator that runs to all levels, five fireplaces, a catering kitchen, and a wine cellar. The large formal living room was decorated by Richard Keith Langham, a New York-based interior designer who worked for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The grounds include a large lawn with terraces, a crescent-shaped drive and a two-car garage.

Photograph by Joe Hodgson/Homesight and Peter Papoulakos.Correction: A previous version of this story stated the house was back on the market at a new price. It is being listed for the first time. When the Wall Street Journal reported a higher price for the house in January, it had not yet been placed on the market.

The first stop for visiting prospective students, Grey House is home to Admission offices and is the starting point for campus tours and on-campus information sessions. Built in the 1850s, the structure was acquired by the college in 1859. It was remodeled as Admission office space in 1991 and expanded in 1999.

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