1862, attributed to Simon Mirault, brickmason. 511 E. Charlton St.
The 500 block of E. Charlton Street dates to 1852, when the City purchased land for the street’s extension from Price Street to East Broad Street. The goal was to provide sites for worker housing to serve the adjacent railroad complex across East Broad. This lot was sold in 1861 to Elizabeth Mirault, a free woman of color whose ancestors immigrated to Savannah from Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s. Her husband, Simon, was a brickmason in Savannah and prominent in Reconstruction politics. Simon Mirault probably designed and constructed the brick house himself, illustrating how this livelihood was one of the skilled professions that many blacks (free and enslaved) worked at in the South.