Bride's Hill

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Bride's Hill This historic house is Alabama's earliest surviving, and most significant, example of the so-called "Tidewater-type" dwelling. Brought to the early Alabama plantation frontier by settlers from the Tidewater and Piedmont regions of Virginia, this vernacular house-type is usually a story-and-a-half in height, and characterized by prominent end chimneys flanking a steeply pitched roof often pierced by dormer windows. The type has entered popular American culture as the so-called "Williamsburg cottage" (after the 18th-century capital of the colony of Virginia. A member of the Dandridge family, cousins of America's first First Lady (Martha Washington) is believed to have built Bride's Hill. Its deep cellar houses. lighted by oblong ground-level windows, houses a basement kitchen-dining room. On the main floor a broad central hall, with a graceful reverse-flight stairway rising to the low half-story above, separates two large rooms. Allegedly a separate brick kitchen structure once stood to the rear. When absorbed into the vast Joseph Wheeler estate in 1907, the house and surrounding farm became known as Sunnybrook.