Merrehope is a modern name adopted by the Meridian Restoration Foundation when it bought this building in 1968 and restored it as a house museum. In 1858 Richard McLemore, the area’s first settler, gave the Merrehope site to his daughter, Juriah, and her husband, W. H. Jackson, who constructed a small residence. Tradition has it that when J. C. Lloyd purchased the land in 1881 and built a larger dwelling, he made the existing cottage into its rear service wing. His new construction took the form of a bracketed Italianate Villa with a conventional center-hall double-pile plan expanded by means of rectangular and polygonal bays. In 1904, Sam H. Floyd became the property’s owner. He retained the front balcony, but replaced the front porch with a grand colonnade of Ionic columns on masonry plinths and further remodeled, elaborated, and enlarged the house to produce the present twenty-six-room building.