Koger-Murray-Carroll House: Dorchester County's Oldest Home

The Koger-Murray-Carroll House, listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 25, 1974 as the Old Carroll Place, is a two-story black cypress plantation house at the junction of Wire and Quaker Roads near Grover, a few miles west of St. George. It is generally held to be the oldest standing house in Dorchester County, and it served as a stagecoach stop on the old Charleston-to-Augusta road.

How old is the open question. The federal nomination says one thing, the family record says another, and the chimney has its own opinion.

When was the Koger-Murray-Carroll House built?

The 1974 National Register nomination dates the house to about 1820, because it appears on Robert Mills’s survey of that year and one chimney carries the date 1829, which may mark completion or a remodeling. The Upper Dorchester County Historical Society, which owns the house, puts construction in the 1780s or around 1792, and family histories say the timber was whip-sawn on the property over seven to twelve years. The Wikipedia article reports archival research from around 2012 suggesting a David Campbell or Thomas Ferguson built it by 1780 and that Joseph Koger, who married Campbell’s daughter, inherited and improved it rather than building it. The SC Picture Project says plainly that the construction date is unknown. Sources differ, and the honest range is 1780 to 1829.

What is not in dispute is the material. The house is a plain Georgian I-house of black cypress cut on the land, clapboard-sided, on tall brick piers laid in English bond, with a hip roof, two rear chimneys, and a hip-roofed veranda carried on six wooden posts across five bays. The front door has eight panels and a three-paned transom. Inside there are carved Federal mantels, a dining room wainscot hand-painted to imitate oak, handmade nails and hinges, horsehair plaster over hand-cut lath, and attic beams marked with Roman numerals from the day they were raised. The staircase narrows as it climbs. About 150 feet from the house a grave marker from 1837 remembers three Koger children.

Who were the Kogers, Murrays and Carrolls?

The house takes its name from three owners who all sat in the General Assembly.

Joseph Koger (1779-1852) represented St. George, Dorchester parish in the state House from 1806 to 1812 and the Senate from 1818 to 1838. He was a major in the War of 1812 and served as sheriff of Colleton District from 1813 to 1817. His father, Captain Joseph Koger (1749-1835), fought under Francis Marion; the family had been in the colony since 1738. In 1838 the major sold out and moved his household to Mississippi. Local tradition holds that he offered the people he enslaved a choice between going west with him or being freed, and that those who stayed settled on Koger land near St. George in a neighborhood still called Texas.

John Soule Murray (1792-1844), Koger’s brother-in-law, bought the house and sat in the state Senate from 1840 to 1844. He died there.

James Parsons Carroll (1809-1883), a Charleston-born lawyer, represented Edgefield District in both chambers, signed the Ordinance of Secession, and became chancellor of the Court of Equity in 1859, serving until the court was abolished in 1868. He bought the place around 1850 and is the reason the National Register knows it as Carroll Place. He later sold his interest to Captain Lewis E. Parler, who became St. George’s first town clerk in 1875 and the new county’s first treasurer in 1897.

After Parler the house passed through the Hartzog, May, Canaday and Westendorf families before the Sweatmans bought it in 1946. Fitzhugh Lee Sweatman Sr. and his wife Eulalie built a small one-story house beside it around 1970 and lived there; he died on the property in 1975.

The stagecoach stop on the Orangeburgh Road

The house sits on what the 1825 Mills Atlas shows as the Orangeburgh Road, the main route between Charleston and the inland settlements toward Augusta. It was a stagecoach and wagon stop and, by local account, the only house between St. George and Branchville. For a stretch it operated as a boardinghouse. The road was mostly abandoned after U.S. 78 was built around 1927, which is one reason the house survived with so little change: nobody drove past it anymore.

The boardinghouse years produced the one story everybody in Grover tells. A traveler was stabbed in an upstairs room and bled out on the floor, and the outline is said to be in the wood still, through every attempt to scrub or sand it. That is folklore, recorded by the Dorchester paper, and offered here as such.

Restoration and how to see it

By the end of the twentieth century the house had stood largely empty for more than 25 years and had done time as a barn. The Palmetto Trust put it on South Carolina’s Most Endangered list in 2002. The Sweatman family, Fitzhugh Lee Sweatman Jr. and Martha Westbury-Sweatman, donated it to the Upper Dorchester County Historical Society; the local paper dates the gift to 2004 and Wikipedia to 2008. A state Transportation Enhancement grant paid to stabilize the foundation and roof, the society sold naming rights to the nine-over-nine windows, and the restoration fund famously opened with two hundred-dollar bills in a jar. A major restoration was finished in 2009. Research into the earliest deeds continues.

Location: Junction of Wire Road and Quaker Road, Grover, SC, about three miles west of Grover and a few miles southwest of St. George (GPS 33.1286, -80.6359)
Owner: Upper Dorchester County Historical Society, scdchs.com
Access: The exterior can be seen from the road at any time. The interior is open by appointment and for special tours, including a public open house held October 11, 2025 as part of the county’s 250th-anniversary program.
Cost: None to look. Tours are arranged through the society.
Nearby: Appleby’s Methodist Church, 1.7 mi
From Charleston: About 60 miles northwest, roughly 1 hour 15 minutes

The county map on this site marks the house, and the /history/ page sets it against the rest of upper Dorchester. The dispatches are fiction and stay off the second floor. The historical society has a key, and the floorboards upstairs are exactly as described.