The Oak Place mansion, built in 1840, was designed and originally occupied by the prominent 19th century architect George Steele. It has been owned by the East Huntsville Baptist Church since 1960. The church built a chapel just east of the historic building and uses it for their worship services.
Oak Place is located in a residential neighborhood of northeast Huntsville. A few huge old trees remain on the grounds surrounding the mansion. Oak Place was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. The church recently engaged with a real estate firm to offer the property for sale. The realtor is advertising the property at a price of $1.9 million. The sales flyer notes that "a 1.5-acre land parcel may be carved out of the 3.9 total acres." In other words, the broad, open area in front of the historic home, now a wide, flat grass-covered expanse, could be divided up by a developer and used for construction of a half dozen or more new houses.
Such a sale would be a major setback for the cause of historic preservation in Huntsville, a city which has diligently protected many of its historic landmarks and buildings. We hope that East Huntsville Baptist Church will explore other options and not sell Oak Place on an unrestricted basis, which could well result in the antebellum mansion either being demolished or its historic significance being fundamentally altered. An ideal solution would be for the site to be purchased by the City of Huntsville or a nonprofit organization and maintained as a museum or public park, or for the city to relocate the home onto an existing historic site operated by the city, as has been done in the past.
