Rich Joe's Vann House
After Rich Joe's father died, he made improvement and changes to the new house. After Rich Joe took control of the home he commissioned and paid for decorating the house with hand carvings that adorned the house along with the original colors between 1809 and 1818. Rich Joe hired a father and son construction crew for the work. In 1818, John McCartney and his son James arrived at The Vann House and began their work. While there, the McCartneys added all of the current woodwork in the house including ionic columns. The McCartneys also built the house’s most unusual piece of architecture, a floating staircase in the hallway of the third floor. It received the nickname “floating,” also called hanging, because the second landing of the staircase sits over the first floor hall with no visible supports. This lack of visible structure gives a viewer the illusion that the landing is hanging or floating in midair.
The Vann stairway is called a cantilevered staircase, one of oldest examples of cantilevered construction in Georgia. That was one side of the main entrance, which originally faced the Federal Road and works like a set of scales. To get a set of scales to balance themselves an equal weight must be applied to each side. The staircase of the Vann House works in a similar manner. Though half of the staircase is suspended over the first floor hallway, roughly six inches of the opposite side of the stairway is in a solid brick wall. The brick wall is far denser than the second landing; this means there will never be enough weight on the landing to “tip the scale.”
In 1819, President James Monroe and his three men were on a trip from Augusta to Nashville, they were going to spend the night in the Spartan Moravian mission at Spring Place but President Monroe went to a near location - The Vann House - about a mile away. Rich Joe was 20 years old when he met President Monroe. He found the "Vann House" more comfortable than the mission so he asked Rich Joe permission to spend the night in his house. President Monroe admired the Vann House.
Read more about this topic: Chief Vann House Historic Site
Famous quotes containing the words rich, joe and/or house:
“A hair plucked from a rich man is thicker than a poor man’s waist.”
—Chinese proverb.
“While we were thus engaged in the twilight, we heard faintly, from far down the stream, what sounded like two strokes of a woodchopper’s axe, echoing dully through the grim solitude.... When we told Joe of this, he exclaimed, “By George, I’ll bet that was a moose! They make a noise like that.” These sounds affected us strangely, and by their very resemblance to a familiar one, where they probably had so different an origin, enhanced the impression of solitude and wildness.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Science is facts. Just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts. But a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.”
—Jules Henri Poincare (1854–1912)