A Private Residence

On July 6 1812, Dr. Robert Butler bought the property and undertook an artful remodeling. In "Smithfield, A Pictorial History", Segar Cofer Dashiell explains this process which is paraphrased below. "He (Dr. Butler) converted the one story, three-room building into a three-story, ten-room mansion, without altering  or enlarging the original brick walls. He removed all interior partitions, raised the floor thereby making a basement with an eight foot ceiling. He made the porch part of the interior of the residence thus creating an extra eight feet in depth to the interior and divided the main floor into a wide hall with a stairway and large room on each side, back of which was a cross hall, and a large room in the rotunda. He raised the ends of the hipped roof to form sharp gables, added five dormer windows across the front roof and two on the rotunda, and divided the third floor into a hall and three very large bedrooms. He put a small porch at the main entrance, with a basement entrance under the porch and windows on each side where the arches had been. There were four rooms in the basement where he fitted up his medical office store rooms, and kitchen.  In order to cover the patched brickwork of the arches, the front was covered with gray stucco."