604 S Center Street
ADDRESS: 604 S. Center Street
BUILT: 1850s
ARCHITECTURAL STYLE: Vernacular I-House; 1870s Renovations – Italianate
John Perry purchased this house in 1860 at auction for his daughter Sarah and her husband William F. Pumphrey, a carpenter. The auction announcement indicates the lot was three acres and on it was “a comfortable house nearly new and necessary out-houses.”
The two-story vernacular I-house has a onestory porch with Roman Doric columns. The Italianate bay window was added after the Civil War.
When war was declared, William Pumphrey joined the first Virginia regiment, Company H, Kemper’s Brigade, part of the Richmond Blues, and went to war. Sarah Perry Pumphrey stayed in the house with their two young children.
In September 1862, Sarah received word that her husband had been killed at the Battle of South Mountain near Frederick, Md. With her two toddler-age children, she went through enemy lines to retrieve his body. At a field hospital run by Catholic sisters near Frederick, she stopped to ask for help in finding William’s body and found that he was alive and in that hospital. Sarah stayed and nursed him back to health before returning to Ashland. Private Pumphrey was sent to Portsmouth, Va., as a prisoner of war.
Oral family history tells that the house was occupied by Union troops. The formidable Sarah Perry Pumphrey “stood in front of her piano and said, ‘well, I can’t stop you from taking over the house, but I will brain the first one of you that lays a finger on my piano!’”
After the war, Private Pumphrey began calling himself “Captain” Pumphrey. His war wounds were a point of pride, and he was never very well after he returned home. The family created a bench for him between two oaks in the front yard where “Old Cap. Pumphrey” spent many days watching the trains. Sarah and William raised seven children in the house. One child, William F. Pumphrey Jr., worked with the RF&P Railroad as a conductor.
In 1872, John Perry sold the house to his daughter Sarah as “feme sole” but her husband was her trustee – married women did not own land without the help of a trustee. The Pumphreys lost the house in 1894 in a default, and the house and land were auctioned.