The Cooper – Lea And Harris House

MADISON – At the junction of Metaire Lane, on the hill at the north side of Eastview Drive, sits a large house with an Alabama Historical Commission marker in the front yard. A photo of the house, along with a synopsis of its history, is on page 73 of Madison’s sesquicentennial book “Memories of Madison: A Connected Community”. The unusual story of the house goes back to the earliest days of settlement of Madison County. In more recent years, the house was home to Ann Marie Lacy, Madison’s City Attorney. However, the house was not initially built in Madison, but the wooden portion of it was moved here by Tyler and Evelyn Darwin in the 1970s. The original brick portions were demolished on the arsenal lands afterward by the Army.

James Cooper initially constructed the house a mile north of the Tennessee River in the southern part of today’s Redstone Arsenal. He began by developing a bricked two-room house with a bricked basement, using brick that had been brought down the river from Chattanooga for his later-to-be bride, Charity Allison. They married in 1832 when she was about 30 and he was about 40. Charity was born in Ireland and came with her parents William and Isabella Allison to Madison County in 1817. That was about the same time that James arrived and began buying land for a plantation that eventually totaled about 640 acres.

According to an article written by Pat Jones in the Huntsville Times (March 5, 1933) and included in Volume 2 of the book HISTORIC SCRAPBOOK, in the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library, James committed suicide just two years after his marriage to Charity. The reason for his action is unknown, but the method was highly unusual. He walked the mile from his home to the river with a large iron pot strapped to his head on a cold December 7 in 1834. He had apparently fastened the pot to his head to ensure a head-first drowning, and then he jumped into the river.

James left the plantation to Charity, and she remained a lonesome widow for about six years, often sitting on her front porch during warm days to watch travelers who had come across the river on Leeman’s Ferry. She was also frequently noticed by the owner of an adjacent plantation, neighbor Houston Lea. Houston courted her for several years until she agreed to marry him. However, before their marriage Charity insisted that he sign an agreement that gave her the right to inherit all of his property when he died. It also banned Houston from inheriting her property if she died before he did. This early form of a pre-nuptial agreement was recorded in the terms of a deed documented in Madison County Deed Book S, written and signed on December 1, 1840. Houston did not require that Charity sign a similar agreement about his own estate. The pre-nuptial terms imposed on Houston Lea by Charity turned out to be unnecessary. Charity outlived Houston, who was 5 years younger than he was, so Houston left her with combined lands of over 2000 acres when he died in 1853. Charity herself died in 1872, after falling on hard times as a result of the Civil War. She lost her plantation in a sheriff’s sale for debts in the late 1860s.

Still, it was Houston Lea who expanded the Cooper house to become a truly impressive mansion by adding to the two-room structure built by James Cooper. From the front wooden section of the dwelling back to the old brick part was constructed a connecting link over a story and a half in height and composed of four more rooms. This division was enclosed on both sides, and at the back was a brick stoop, making it possible to pass from any room in the house during rainy weather without going out into the dampness. The result was to produce a large Z-shaped house that was partially bricked and in which one could go from room-to-room without ever going outside. (For those unfamiliar with the word “stoop” in architecture, it refers to a roofed porch or a landing at staircase that leads to the entrance to another building.)

Charity Cooper was in the 1839 list of her father William Allison’s heirs. Charity’s brother John was executor of William’s will. Her brother David had a daughter named Isabella (after his mother). Isabella married the Reverend Alexander Penland, now buried at Ebenezer Presbyterian Church on Hobbs Island Road. Charity herself had her first husband, James Cooper, also interred in the Ebenezer Church cemetery after an initial burial in the plantation’s Cooper-Penland Cemetery on the arsenal of today. Charity’s sister Mary Jane Allison married Edward Parker, while her sister Catharine Ann Allison married U. S. Congressman Williamson R. W. Cobb, who was appointed by Abraham Lincoln to be Governor of Alabama after the secession and during the Civil War. That congressman and his wife are buried in the Cobb Cemetery on the east side of the south end of the Old U. S. Highway 431 bridge over the Flint River south of Hampton Cove.

Charity’s sister Martha married Dr. James W. Fennell. Two Fennell brothers purchased Charity’s estate at the sheriff’s sale after the war ended. Another of Charity’s sisters, Isabella, married James’ brother Francis Fennell. These were the two Fennell brothers that bought Charity’s plantation at the sheriff’s sale, but the land was soon afterward divided and sold to several different owners, with Joseph B. Harris buying some of the land and the house by 1920. The house was thereafter known as the Harris House when the army obtained the property in the early 1940s.

It should be noted that not only the house connects to Madison, but the Fennell brothers were closely related to Isham Fennell, whose daughter Charlotte married William Lanford and lived in the Landford-Slaughter mansion. Also, Dr. John Robert Slaughter married Mary Elizabeth Lanford (daughter of William and Charlotte) and lived in the mansion, where he built a separate bricked physician’s office on a patio just off the front steps on the south face of the building. The main mansion still stands in magnificent condition on the east bank of Indian Creek at 7400 Old Madison Pike. Charlotte’s granddaughter “Lottie” Slaughter married Jim Cain, a merchant in the town of Madison. The Cain family had the store at 202 Main Street and lived in the great house at 18 Arnett Street in Madison. More about these houses and the families who have lived in them is written in the official sesquicentennial book “Memories of Madison” (1857 – 2007) available now from the Madison Station Historical Society and the Blue Apple bookstore on Main Street.

Early censuses show that Charity Allison Cooper Lea’s neighbors included William Lehman, who owned and operated Lehman’s Ferry on the Tennessee River. William was the father-in-law of George Martin, first lot owner and storekeeper of Madison. Others with Madison historical connections who lived near Charity Allison Cooper Lea included Clement Lanier and Alexander Gray Wall. Clement Lanier was closely related to the Laniers of Madison, and Alexander Wall is believed to be the progenitor of the family for which Wall Highway is named. In fact, Alexander Wall married Mary Cooper, sister of James, the first husband of Charity.

Even Tyler and Evelyn Darwin, who used their U. S. Congressional influence in 1973 to rescue the Cooper-Lea House from the Army’s planned demolition were connected in several ways to the people already mentioned. They had the original wooden portions of the house and the additions made by Houston Lea moved to its present site on the southeastern slope of Rainbow Mountain. The Darwins were themselves connected to Madison via their arsenal Lanier ancestry and by the fact that Tyler had lived on the pre-arsenal lands of Thomas Jamar and Thomas Owen, who were who were sometimes listed in census records as living next door to Thomas Beadle, an early Madison resident, land speculator, and storekeeper. These two Madison-area pioneers lived adjacent to Houston and Charity Lea in the 1850 census, but later they were found to have also lived for a time near what became Gate 7 to the arsenal from Zierdt Road at Martin Road. Obviously, the old Cooper- Lea-Harris House had many owners and visitors with a large number of ties to Madison’s history.