The Marietta Pilgrimage
A Christmas Home Tour through Marietta, Georgia

Blair-Runyon-Gay House, c. 1900

26 Sessions Street

 

Records indicate this house was built by Daniel Webster Blair, a prominent Marietta politician and landowner, around the turn of the 20th century. Blair, who had served as mayor and later as a judge, was listed as the owner of the house when he sold it for $400 in 1902. J. Frank Lumpkin, a local stonecutter with a family of four, is listed as living there in the 1900 census; apparently renting from Blair. Lumpkin later bought the home and sold it in 1904. The house then changed hands once more before being sold to I.A. Runyon in 1920, and the property remained in his family for the next 58 years. The carriage house was added during this period, most likely in the 1940s. The house suffered a major fire in 1939 and needed extensive repairs.

 

Later owners enclosed a screened back porch, added the sunroom and converted the attic into living space. It has four fireplaces (converted from coal to gas) and evidence of the wood-burning stove once located in the kitchen is apparent in the ceiling. Charles and Jennifer Gay purchased the home in 2006 and have steadily been updating it while furnishing it with an assortment of English and American antiques, including many inherited from Mr. Gay's ancestral home in Starkville, Miss. Interesting pieces include the 1850s walnut plantation desk originally created for Black Jack, Mr. Gay's family's plantation in Oktibbeha County, Miss.; an English grandfather clock dating to approximately 1815; an 1850s louvered silver condiment caddy (likely a technological marvel in its day): a mahogany chest of drawers dating to the 1790s and the early 1900s primitive American pump organ Mrs. Gay's grandmother and great-grandmother both played in church in their small eastern North Carolina town.

 

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