In 1894 I.S. Bendall purchased a lot of land on Green Street from William and Liza L. Nelson. It was very likely in the year following that the home at 927 Green Street was constructed.

Isaac Skipwith Bendall, the fifth of nine children born to Richard Augustus and Lucy Edmunds Oliver Bendall was born in Sussex County, Virginia in 1842. The family arrived in Danville about 1880 where they entered the tobacco business. When war broke out between the states, Mr. Bendall enlisted. He served in the cavalry under J.E.B. Stuart. At the battle of Five Forks he was severely wounded in the throat and retired from service. In 1876, he married Virginia Lee Moore of Batesville, Mississippi. He died in 1920 from “the infirmities of old age” exacerbated by that old wound to the throat.

Upon Mr. Bendall’s death, his children, as executors of his estate, sold the house to the Trustees of the District Parsonage of the Danville District of the Virginia Conference of the Methodist Church. For the twenty-five years that followed, the house became the home of the clergy for Mt. Vernon Methodist Church. Such men (and their families) included Reverends S.J., Battin, R.T. Waterfield, Edwin L. Bain, Frank A. McSparran, Joseph T. Allen, and Harry S. Coffey.

In 1947, the Trustees of the Virginia Conference sold the home to H. Morris and Mildred Butler. Mr. Butler and his family arrived in Danville sometime after 1940 from Norfolk, Virginia where he had been employed as a store manager for a retail grocery chain. The Butlers were not here long before they relocated to Petersburg, Virginia. The house was sold in 1949 to J.P. and Sadie Clayton.

John Pumphrey Clayton was a native of Roxboro, North Carolina. Born in 1872, Mr. Clayton was in Danville before 1900. He was employed by the city as an electrical operator. John married Sadie Latitia Gosney in Pellham in 1896, and the couple had three children. When Mrs. Clayton passed away in her Green Street home on January 2, 1954 of cerebral thrombosis. The house was immediately put on the market and listed for $9,000 “for quick sale.” Six days later, the house was sold to Martin Realty Company of Danville. The house changed hands several times over the next two and a half decades. For almost twenty years, from 1979 until 1998, it was the home of the Robert Posey family. From 1998 until 2017 it was the home of Daniel Lee Swain. Present owners David Shilling and Mary “Jeannie” Bell acquired the property in 2017 and have maintained the beautiful home since.

Sources:
Census and Vital records found at Familysearch.org
Images and vital information, including biographical sketches found at FindaGrave.com
Death notices and other information found in the Danville Register, Danville Bee archives at Newspapers.com
Census, Directory, Newspaper, and other information compiled by Paul Liepe