Grimes House

Currently used as our staff and volunteer building, the Grimes House is closed to the public.

The Grimes House once sat on a plantation and is typical of a wealthy home during the antebellum period. In an interview that took place around 2015, Historic Westville employees had the opportunity to talk to a former resident of the home. The woman, Mrs. Barbour, lived in the home from 1946-1947. Her great-great-grandmother was enslaved in the area and was sold away to Alabama. Mrs. Barbour’s great grandmother, Lucy Watson, was left behind. While African-American women had children, in terms of social construct, they did not have the same right to be mothers as their white enslavers did. They could have their children brutally ripped from them on a whim from their enslaver, and it happened frequently. This story of forced family separation is typical of the chattel slavery that plagued the South during Westville’s time period.