[1][2] A member of the Dandridge family, cousins of America's first First Lady (Martha Washington), is believed to have built Bride's Hill.

Its deep cellar, lighted by oblong ground-level windows, houses a basement kitchen-dining room.

On the main floor a broad central hall, with a graceful reverse-flight stairway rising to the low half-story above, separates two large rooms.

When absorbed into the vast Joseph Wheeler estate in 1907, the house and surrounding farm became known as Sunnybrook.

[3] Brought to the early Alabama plantation frontier by settlers from the Tidewater and Piedmont regions of Virginia, this vernacular house-type is usually a story-and-a-half in height, and characterized by prominent end chimneys flanking a steeply pitched roof often pierced by dormer windows.