Chief Vann House Historic Site - Rich Joe's Vann House

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.