Who built the Bellingrath Home? Meet contractor Peyton Higgison Sr.

By Tom McGehee, Museum Director of the Bellingrath Home

It is well known that the Bellingrath Home was designed by noted Mobile architect George B. Rogers, but who took those plans and brought them to reality?  According to some bills in the Bellingrath Archives, the contractor was Peyton Higgison Sr.  And like his client, Walter Bellingrath, he was a native of Georgia.

U.S. census records reveal that Higgison was born near Macon in 1891, the eldest of four children.  His father’s occupation was given as “letter carrier” and he gave his place of birth as Ireland.  It is not known what brought Higgison to Alabama’s Port City, but by the early 1920s, Higgison Construction Company was listed in Mobile’s city directories with an office address of “212 City National Bank Building.”  That office building had been designed by George B. Rogers and since 1915 had actually housed the First National Bank.

According to bills in the Bellingrath archives, Higgison was responsible not just for the Bellingrath Home’s construction, but also for a brick building to house the boiler for the Conservatory adjoining the Rose Garden.  A bill from McPhillips Manufacturing Company of Mobile dated December 19, 1935, indicates that the double hung windows and two sliding doors cost a total of $48.60.

The success of the Bellingrath Home, completed in 1936, may well have led to his next job: The Grand Hotel.  There had been a hotel at Point Clear since 1847.  After the original 40-room structure burned in 1869, a rambling structure containing 60 suites was completed in 1875.

Waterman Steamship Company owned it by the late 1930s and contracted with Higgison to replace it with the current main structure, which was built between 1939 and 1941.  As Walter Bellingrath had been a charter stockholder in that steamship company, members of the firm would have been very familiar with the quality of his recently completed home.

In 1945, Higgison was called upon by the members of Mobile’s second oldest Episcopal church for an unusual project.  The Parish had been established in 1845 with Trinity Church completed at St. Anthony and Jackson streets in 1853.  By the 1920s, the automobile helped to move Mobilians ever westward and what today is known as the DeTonti Square District began to decline with commercial intrusion.

Land on Dauphin Street, west of Carlen Street, had been purchased in 1932 with a move in mind.  The church decided to make that move as World War II came to a close. Earlier, Higgison had given a bid of $10,500 to build a duplicate of the St. Anthony Street structure, but the war had intervened.  In May 1945, the congregation decided to move the old one, brick by brick, board by board, to the new address.  The relocation was completed within a year, and the church was re-consecrated in 1950.

After his success with the rebuilding of Trinity Episcopal Church, Higgison was called upon to construct three more churches: Dauphin Way Methodist Church in 1957, the Greek Orthodox Church on Ann Street in 1961 and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in 1964.  And in the midst of all this church building, he constructed the ultra-modern local headquarters for IBM, which today houses the personnel board for Mobile County at 1809 Government Street.

Peyton Higgison died in 1975 at the age of 83 and his funeral was held in Trinity Episcopal Church.