121 Saluda Avenue
2024 Palladium Tour: Landmarks & Landscapes
121 Saluda Avenue
Built for real estate developer Thomas E. Hair and his family between 1938 and 1942 from a design by Robert Eisenschmidt, this Colonial Revival residence is indicative of the type of home envisioned by the Columbia Development Corporation, which laid out Wales Garden over two decades prior. From its bold and multi-faceted entrance, defined largely by a delicate tracery of its fanlight and sidelights, to its symmetrically placed six-over-six windows and bold dentil work and brackets, the Hair residence exuded the tenets of the 18th – and early 19th-century Georgian and Federal periods.
Although the Columbia Development Corporation surveyed the entire neighborhood of Wales Garden in 1914, the western side of Saluda Avenue between Enoree and Lower (Heyward) streets (block “N”) remained undeveloped until the late 1930s. In 1931, Thomas Eugene Hair (1895-1976) and his wife, Nell Roper Hair (1900-1969), purchased the lots of present-day 121 Saluda Avenue for $6,000. However, construction of their home did not begin until 1938. At that time, the home’s anticipated value was $10,000.
Records show that the house was not ready for occupation until 1942, nearly four years after the city issued the construction permit. The construction supply chain may have been an issue, as was often the case for higher-end homes that included custom work and raw materials purchased from outside South Carolina. Alternatively, the sub-contractors hired by Hair may have been focused on completing the succession of buildings he developed under his firm Five Points Development Company.
Robert Eisenschmidt (1880-1941), a native of Germany, was practicing as an architect in Columbia as early as 1922, but his strongest partnership was with Hair, as seen in this advertisement for the Five Points Development Company from 1938. Eisenschmidt left Columbia to work for the war effort about 1940 before passing away.
The Hair family lived at the residence from 1942 until 1953. During their tenure, they experienced some instances of petty crime, including “someone set[ting] fire to a wooden statue in the yard,” (August 1946) and the “theft of three boxwood plants valued at $300,” (October 1951).
The Hairs also have a connection to Historic Columbia. In 1943, they purchased the Hampton-Preston Mansion, and the following year they began operating it as a tourist home. The couple’s desire to bring back the “hospitality of the Old South” for white travelers on modest means traded on a shared nostalgia common among middle- and upper-class white Southerners who romanticized the antebellum South. The architectural style of this home reflects this nostalgia, as does the “Williamsburg mantles” featured within.
The Hairs, like most owners in Wales Garden, had space for a live-in maid or housekeeper—the small elevator was once a back staircase used by the staff. During the late 1940s, Nell Hair sought out a “settled woman” for this position to live in their garage apartment.
At the time, all homeowners in Wales Garden who, like the Hairs, had purchased land or homes from the Columbia Development Corporation, were bound by a restrictive covenant that prohibited those of African descent from purchasing or renting the property. However, a search of census records for 1940 and 1950 show Black domestic workers living in nearby homes, which indicates that those employed as live-in workers on a property were exempt from this restriction.
The Hairs advertised 121 Saluda as for sale at least twice, once in March 1950 and again in March 1953. In addition to the mantles, its selling points included five bathrooms, a full basement with oil heat, a three-car garage with servant’s quarters, and a “life time roof”—a jade green asbestos tile roof that a future homeowner replaced by the 1980s, if not sooner.
In 1953, the Hairs sold 121 Saluda Avenue to Margaret Haynes (1906-1997) and Lanneau Lide Foster (1908-1967). The coupled founded the Foster School of Dance about 1934, a venture which continued long after Lanneau’s unexpected death in 1967.
In 1956, the Fosters hosted Nat Stoudenmire, a former pupil who acted on Broadway, in their home. They sold 121 Saluda Avenue shortly thereafter.
In 1973, attorney Thomas Delano Broadwater (1935-2022) purchased the residence. At the time, Broadwater was best known for his legal work on local civil rights cases and his involvement with the United Citizens Party, which he co-founded in 1970. He was likely the first Black homeowner in the Wales Garden neighborhood; the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 rendered the restrictive covenants placed on this home and others in the neighborhood illegal.
In November 1974, a major fire of undetermined source caused $38,000 in damage to the residence. Broadwater surveys the damage in one of the images featured. He continued living at the residence until 1978.
In the ensuing 45 years, 121 Saluda has exchanged hands just three additional times; the current owners purchased the property in 2019 and participated in Historic Columbia’s “plaque project” that same year.
"Before" Photo Gallery
The circa 2018 images above were pulled from CMLS listing 443806. Listing agent Elizabeth M. Sullivan of Home Advantage Realty.
