Bettie Hunter House

The Bettie Hunter House is a historic African American residence in Mobile, Alabama, United States. It was the residence of Bettie Hunter, a former slave who grew wealthy from a successful hack and carriage business she operated in Mobile with her brother, Henry. The fall of New Orleans during the American Civil War had made Mobile the South’s only major port on the Gulf of Mexico. Transportation of goods to and from the port depended on the city's teamsters and their horse or mule-drawn wagons. Bettie Hunter was part of a group of African Americans who recognized the opportunities in the carriage business and she cornered this part of the transportation market in Mobile.

The Hunter House was built in 1878 and is an exceptional example of 19th century residential architecture for an African American in the Deep South. The two-story Italianate house matches Mobile’s white-owned residences of the period in scale and detail. Bettie Hunter died on November 2, 1879, at the age of 27. Her house had just been finished the year before. She was buried in Magnolia Cemetery in Mobile. She had no children and willed the property to her family.

Famous quotes containing the words hunter and/or house:

    There was the murdered corpse, in covert laid,
    And violent death in thousand shapes displayed;
    The city to the soldier’s rage resigned;
    Successless wars, and poverty behind;
    Ships burnt in fight, or forced on rocky shores,
    And the rash hunter strangled by the boars;
    The newborn babe by nurses overlaid;
    And the cook caught within the raging fire he made.
    Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)

    Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things, when every voice is raised for a new road or another statute or a subscription of stock; for an improvement in dress, or in dentistry; for a new house or a larger business; for a political party, or the division of an estate;Mwill you not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable?
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)