The house at 931 Green Street was originally part of the estate of Nathaniel T. Green.

 Dr. Nathaniel Terry Green was born on the 10th of March 1800 in Halifax, Virginia, the seventh of eight children born to Captain Berryman Green and Nancy Terry Green. He married Anne Colquehoun in 1818, and the couple had ten children. Dr. Green came to Danville at an early age and studied medicine under the elder Dr. Paxton and taught school under Levi Holbrook at the Danville Male Academy. He later went to Philadelphia to obtain a formal medical training and returned to Danville to practice medicine with Dr. Patton.

The seat of the Green estate, Dr. Green’s family home, was located on the block of Jefferson Avenue between Colquehoun and Lee Streets, later addressed as 653 Jefferson Avenue (Street). When he prepared his will in March of 1860, he left his house and 20 acres of land to his living, unmarried daughters, Maria, Julia, and Sarah. In 1863, the city of Danville was looking for a solution for its problem of where to bury the city’s dead now that Grove Street Cemetery was filled to bursting. The city purchased 35 acres of the Green estate to establish Green Hill Cemetery, Freedman’s Cemetery, and Green Street Park (now Doyle Thomas Park). The Green family plot, which had been located on Paxton Avenue (between 821 and 841 Paxton Ave) was relocated to the new cemetery.

The Green’s had other homes, including two which had been constructed on Green Street sometime prior to Dr. Green’s death. The same year that the family sold the 35 acres to the city, they also sold their home at 875 Green Street. It’s unclear if family were living there prior to that time, but it is possible that one of the married sons was occupying the house.

Residing in the I-shaped home at 931 Green Street were Dr. Green’s three unmarried daughters and two unmarried sons. Maria Elizabeth was 36 at the time of her father’s death; Julia Claramond, 28; Sarah “Sallie” 26; Berryman, 24; and James C., 22. Four other children had predeceased their father, while the eldest, William Shakespeare Green had established himself and his family elsewhere.

Maria was a well respected school teacher. She never married, and in her later years relocated to Richmond. She died in 1906 after suffering a fall while visiting her nephew in Norfolk.

Berryman Green became a judge, and was well known and greatly respected. He was described as being 5’10” with fair complexion, dark hair and blue eyes. He married Nellie Rives in 1872.

James C. Green became a physician, obtaining his medical degree from the University of Virginia and University of New York. During the war he was taken prisoner while serving as a surgeon in the field and was held hostage in exchange for a Federal spy who later escaped. James married Nancy Dyson Walters in 1891. Their only daughter, Mary Verser Green, married John Thomas Watson, Jr., uniting those two great Danville families.

Because the Green Street house was constructed as part of Dr. Green’s vast estate, it is difficult to assess when the first iteration of the house was built. Prior research combined with an assessment of construction details suggests the house was built as early as 1855, but the house was certainly in existence by 1860 when it was (we think) the home of Dr. Green’s unmarried children. It should be said that this assertion is merely based on some careful guesswork of examining the 1860 census in comparison to its 18880 counterpart (more on that in a minute) which shows a neighboring families who had resided nearby for the entirety of the two interim decades.

Of Dr. Green’s many business interests was his involvement in the Farmers Bank of Virginia, of which he was president at the time of his death. One of his fellow directors, William S. Ayers, stepped forward to purchase the Green Street home from the Children of Dr. Green in 1864, paying the whopping price of $8,000, an amount that reflected wartime inflation. Mr. Ayres does not appear to ever have lived in the house but rather kept it as a boarding house. Because census records prior to 1890 did not reliably identify the address of a home’s occupants, it’s difficult to say who lived there during the two decades of Ayres ownership. However, by carefully comparing the 1880 census to the Beers map of 1877, it is possible to make a somewhat educated if not entirely certain guess that a jeweler by the name of Louis Goldman may have lived here with his wife Clara, their children Sam and, born a year after the census, Belle.

The Goldmans were European immigrants who arrived in the United States sometime in the early 1870s, Louis from Russia and his wife, whom he married in Washington, D.C. in 1875, from Germany. The Goldman’s did not remain in Danville long, by 1884, Mr. Ayres was ready to sell the house, and the Goldmans eventually returned to Washington, D.C.

The property was sold at auction to Matilda Meyers who, like the Ayres, maintained the property for rental investment purposes.

Of those who occupied the home during the time of Ms. Meyers ownership was William Murray Chalmers. Mr. Chalmers was born in Halifax County, Virginia in 1845. After serving during the Civil War, he attended the University of Virginia. He married Emma N. Radford in 1868. For some years he resided in Bedford County, Virginia where he worked as a schoolteacher. He arrived in Danville in 1884 to take the position of high school principal which position he maintained until the close of term in 1895. A few weeks later, upon returning home from church services at the Episcopal Church, he collapsed in his home on Wilson Street and passed away.

Daniel H. Duggar and his young family were next to occupy the house, again, as renters. Daniel, merely 21 when he took occupancy, shared the home with his wife and their two children, as well as his mother-in-law, two brothers-in-law and two servants. Daniel was born in Danville 1874. He began his career in the family business of Dugger & Patrick, tobacco commission merchants, but by 1900 he was employed in the wholesale grocery business. By 1910 he had taken his family to Atlanta, where they remained for nearly twenty years before finally moving to New York City, where he spent the remainder of his life and where he died in 1963.

In 1904, the house was sold to Sarah K. Perkinson, a widow who shared the house with her two adult children Lelia and Albert. Sarah, born in 1838, was the daughter of William H. Waddill and Mary Ann Llewellyn Waddill. She married James Robert Perkinson, a brick mason, in 1858. James died in 1903. When Mrs. Perkinson died, the house passed to her son, Albert.

The youngest of eight children, Albert Perkinson was born in Danville in 1876. He was employed as a bookkeeper and later manager for the Export Leaf Tobacco Company. Her retired from that business, but finding that idle life did not suit him, he became a tax accountant. He married Carolyn McNeil Turner in 1915, and the couple had two children. After retiring a second time, Mr. Perkinson’s health began to take a turn for the worse. In January of 1954, after taking a bath, he slipped and fell in the bathroom of his Green Street home and broke his hip. Two weeks later, he passed away at Memorial Hospital.

After half a century of ownership, Mr. Perkinson’s widow sold the home to Miles and Viola Bennett who occupied the home for the nearly twenty-five years.

Miles Talmadge Bennett was born in 1896 in Iredell, North Carolina. He married Viola B. Davis in 1921. After Mrs. Bennett’s death in 1978, Mr. Bennett sold the house to Drs. Coy and Ann Garbett who have maintained the beautiful home since that time.

Sources:
Census and Vital records and some images found at Familysearch.org
Grave images and vital information, including biographical sketches found at FindaGrave.com
Death notices and other information found at Newspapers.com
Census, Directory, Newspaper, and other information compiled by Paul Liepe