Qualla: Sturdivant Hall

Sturdivant Hall: Introduction

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlabamaSouthern, Public domain. Six thirty-foot Corinthian columns hold up the facade like a dare. Sturdivant Hall stands on Mabry Street in Selma, Alabama, its stucco-covered brick scored to look like stone, its marble imported from Italy, its plasterwork executed by Italian artisans brought to the Deep South for the job. Completed in 1856 for Colonel Edward T. Watts, this 6,000-square-foot Greek Revival mansion cost $69,900 to build, a staggering sum in antebellum Alabama. Edward Vason Jones, the architect who later redesigned interiors at the White House during the 1960s and 1970s, called it one of the finest Greek Revival antebellum mansions in the Southeast. But the house's most persistent fame comes not from its architecture. It comes from a ghost.

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Image: AlabamaSouthern | Public domain

Sturdivant Hall: Cotton, Columns, and Colonel Watts

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathunder, Public domain. Thomas Helm Lee designed the house for Colonel Edward T. Watts, and construction began in 1852. The project took four years to complete, an extravagance that reflected both Watts's ambitions and the wealth flowing through Selma from the cotton trade. The 60-foot-wide facade is do...

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Image: Jonathunder | Public domain

Sturdivant Hall: The Banker Who Never Left

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Altairisfar, CC BY-SA 3.0. John McGee Parkman purchased the house from Watts on February 12, 1864, for $65,000. Parkman was a local banker, and the timing was disastrous. The Confederacy was collapsing, cotton speculation was bleeding fortunes dry, and Parkman's bank accumulated enormous losses. When Recon...

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Image: Altairisfar | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sturdivant Hall: From Parlor to Public Trust

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carol M. Highsmith (1946–), Public domain. After Parkman's death, the house was sold at auction in January 1870 for $12,500 to Emile Gillman, a prominent Selma merchant. The Gillman family maintained the mansion for nearly nine decades, an extraordinary span of single-family stewardship that helped preserve its architectu...

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Image: Carol M. Highsmith (1946–) | Public domain

Sturdivant Hall: Selma's Other History

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DXR, CC BY-SA 4.0. Sturdivant Hall sits barely a mile from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where state troopers attacked civil rights marchers on Bloody Sunday in 1965. The mansion and the bridge are separated by more than distance. One represents the wealth and grandeur of the antebellum South; the othe...

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Image: DXR | CC BY-SA 4.0