By admin 
It was not only Georgetown’s first tavern. It was also its first house.
And it recently came on the market with an asking price of just over $1 million.
The Thomas Bolem House at 719 Prince Street was built around 1734, five years after Georgetown was founded. The tavern was a gathering place for merchants, sailors, locals, travelers and the planters who grew rice, indigo, cotton and trees/lumber to ship all over the world.
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“One would think 250 years ago as President George Washington stayed in Georgetown on his southern tour at the Parker/Stewart House just blocks away, he would have also visited this Tavern at 719 Prince Street,” listing agency Cal Harrelson of Peace Sotheby’s International Realty said. “He spoke to the townspeople just around the corner on Front Street.”
History surrounds the house. A couple of blocks away, the three-story Tarbox House was used as a lookout across the bay for British ships entering the harbor during the Revolutionary War.
There’s a story about General Francis Marion, The Swamp Fox, and General Peter Horry finding three British Officers upstairs with scantily clad women when they took back the city from the British.
“Pistols were drawn and swords too, a shot fired, one officer jumped over the porch and broke a leg — as told by former Mayor Jack Scoville, another girl wrapped her arms around her man and begged for his life. All Officers were let go,” Harrelson said.
The Winyah Indigo Society Hall just down the street was used as a hospital for Union troops during the Civil War.
And then there are the ghosts. What old South Carolina home doesn’t have some ghost stories?
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“Unexplained visitors and an elderly sailor appearing within the house have become part of Georgetown’s rich ghost story folklore,” Harrelson said.
It is on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the larger Georgetown Historic District.
The house has been renovated and has a gourmet kitchen and stainless appliances, refinished original hardwood flooring, 10-foot ceilings, a new HVAC heat pump and a recently sodded large and fenced backyard.
It has first and second floor side-to-side piazzas that capture trade winds. It also has four bedrooms, two baths and 3,650 square feet on 0.18 acres.
“The opportunity not simply to live in The Historic District, but to become the steward of a property connected to Georgetown, South Carolina’s very beginnings and the earliest history of the United States of America,” Harrelson said.
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