Swansea now has a location on the National Register of Historic Places

The Olivia, Peter M. and Alice House, a Queen Anne-style home located in the heart of the Lexington County town of about 700 people, is the first site in the municipality to be added to the national preservational list.

Tom Daugherty and Scott Holmes, who own the house, felt compelled to safeguard its history.

“The architecture and the workmanship of years ago is not comparable to today. They took so much time and effort and pride in their work,” Daugherty said. “I think all that needs to be preserved. I’ve always admired old things.”

According to their application to be on the National Register, the one-and a-half story house retains a substantial amount of architectural features associated with the Queen Anne style, including a wrap-around porch, porch columns and balusters, original wood siding, trim, and beadboard ceilings.

The home is also still adorned with its original metal/tin roof, which is over a century old. The owners said it needs to be resealed on a routine basis due to its age.

Daugherty and Holmes have also added some new touches to the house, including an outdoor patio and fireplace made with bricks from the former Boozer’s Grocery, one of the original buildings in town. Holmes shared that many of the bricks were handmade and have fingerprints from the people who created them.

Both owners share a love for antiques and have completely decorated the house with them. Other pieces in the home were built by Holmes. 

While Daugherty and Holmes shared a love for preserving history, there are a few changes they would like to make to the layout of the house, including tearing down walls to create more of an open concept.

Now that the house is listed on the register, there are certain characteristics they can’t change, one being the windows – the owners noted that a house near them is unable to be listed due to their windows having been replaced.

Per their application, the house, built between 1903 and 1904, is one of few remaining examples of Victorian residential architecture in Swansea. The Queen Anne style was popular from the mid-1800s into the early 1900s, with most of the popularization being influenced by pattern books and the expansion of railroads across the county, Swansea included.

The town itself was incorporated in December 1892 and grew around a stop on the Southbound Railroad, which went from Savannah, Ga.,to Columbia. By 1896, the town had a drug store, three physicians, a hotel, a grocery store, a Baptist church, a private school for whites and multiple merchants.

The house has changed owners numerous times, with the Hertzog family holding onto it the longest. But the Oliver family owned it originally, with the current owners sharing that the original land the house is located on was owned by Alice Oliver, formerly Yarborough, and her husband Peter built the home.

Though they are preserving the town's history, Daugherty and Holmes aren’t natives of Swansea. They’re originally from Kentucky, moving to the area when Holmes took a job at Fort Jackson. When inquired by the Chronicle about why they wanted to preserve the house, outside of their love for antiques, they shared they loved the town and the people.

They noted recent controversies with the town’s government in explaining why they felt compelled to preserve the house’s history. From recent infighting and lawsuits relating to disagreements over the town’s budget to the 2021 indictment of the town’s then mayor, Swansea has often found itself in the headlines for the wrong reasons.

“We really wanted to do something nice for this town because this town needs something uplifted,” Holmes said. “It's just been, you know, one scandal after another and we've been following and we thought, and Tom especially thought, that if we did this, that would be something that the town could kind of take pride in.”