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Price House - Overview

Thomas and Ann Price built the three-story brick house that bears their name about 1795 near present-day Woodruff in lower Spartanburg County.  Until his death in 1821, Mr. Price ran a general store, a post office, and a "house of publick entertainment" (a tavern or inn) that provided beds, food, and drink to stagecoach travelers.  Over two-dozen enslaved African American men, women, and children performed much of the work for these business enterprises and lived in quarters not unlike the slave cabin located on the site today.

The Price's brick house with its steep gambrel roof and inside-end-chimneys is most unusual for our section of the United States.  The bricks for the house were made on the premises and are laid in Flemish Bond.  In addition to the main house, there is a kitchen building and a double-pen slave cabin.  The cabin, moved from its original location in Newberry County, was painstakingly reconstructed on the site in 2004 and is one of just a few existing slave quarters in the Upstate.

Guided tours of the Price House and slave cabin as well as the site's nature trail through the forest surrounding the site tell of the environment-altering work done by settlers and slaves to transform the Backcountry frontier into a region that was a fully-integrated part of the commercial, transportation, and agricultural networks of the early United States.

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