The house was the scene of the 1981 killing of Danny Hansford by the home's owner Jim Williams, a story that is retold in the 1994 John Berendt book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

Williams held annual Christmas parties at Mercer House, on the eve of the Savannah Cotillion Club's debutante ball, which were the highlight of many people's social calendars.

[9] The project was interrupted by the American Civil War, and finally completed around 1868 by the new owner, cotton merchant John Randolph Wilder.

[12] It then lay vacant for a decade, until 1969, when Jim Williams, one of Savannah's earliest and most dedicated private restorationists, bought the house for $55,000[13] and fully restored it over two years.

[1] In 1979, during the filming on Monterey Square of The Ordeal of Dr. Mudd, starring Dennis Weaver, Williams hung a flag of Nazi Germany outside of a window at Mercer House in an attempt to disrupt the shoot, after the film company declined to make a donation to the local humane society, of which Williams was on the board,[14] as he had requested.

[15][16] Jackie Onassis, the widow of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy, visited Mercer House with her friend Maurice Tempelsman in the early 1980s.

[7] The property, constructed with "Philadelphia Red" bricks,[9] is three stories, including a basement, where Williams's restoration workshop was.

In 1997, Dorothy Kingery established a trademark for the home's façade, and her lawyer dispatched letters to local artists demanding that they either stop using photographs of it for their own gain, or give her 10% of their proceeds.

His first purchase, made in London in 1971, was a large silver-gilt and enamel-mounted leather box, or presentation casket, bearing the Imperial coat-of-arms and the gold-crowned cypher of Tsar Nicholas II.

John Berendt stated that Williams also had a copy of Harris Tattnall's 1978 book At Home in Savannah: Great Interiors[28] on the coffee table during one of his visits.

Williams also owned a large silver-gilt and enamel-mounted leather desk folio, with the initial N 11 and the corners decorated with Imperial eagles.

It was made for Tsar Nicholas II and was purchased by Williams at a Sotheby Parke Bernet sale in New York in 1979.

[1] An American carved wooden eagle with outspread wings, which was perched on a bracket in the drawing room and used on the first tug boat to ply the Savannah harbor, is estimated at $4,000.

More than one hundred pieces of Chinese blue and white porcelain from the Nanking cargo—a wreck of treasures which sank in the South China Sea in 1752—is also included, with an estimate of $5,500–$8,500.

Above this was one of two Brussels tapestries from the 18th century, depicting a couple (possibly Venus and Adonis) embracing, with Cupid holding a shield emblazoned with a heart.

[23] Williams owned nine pastels on paper depicting members of the Southwell and Perceval families, attributed to artist Henrietta Johnston, with seven in their original black frames.

One, which Williams had on display in the library for a period after its purchase in early 1980,[30] shows John Perceval, head of the Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia.

Williams said: "The thought of owning nine works by America's first panelist and first woman artist kept me awake the rest of the night."

[1] The study, where the shooting of Danny Hansford took place, is at the front left of the house, the side bounded by West Gordon Street to the south.

The semi-circular staircases leading down to the basement and up to the second floor is halfway along the left side of the entrance hall, just before which was the grandfather clock that Hansford, Williams claimed, knocked over immediately prior to his death.

On the right-hand wall of the entrance hall was another 18th-century Brussels tapestry, woven with silk, wool and metallic threads, depicting Diana and her nymphs bathing beside a fountain.

Immediately inside the front door, to the left, was a George III mahogany linen press, albeit with some replacement parts.

[26] The hallway, the original ceramic floor tiles for which were imported from Stoke-on-Trent, England,[9] was designed to double as a summer living-room.

[26] A pair of paintings by Thomas Hudson, portraits of Mr. and Mrs. James Hilhouse of Cornwallis House, Clifton, Bristol, were hung in this room.

[26] Inside the ballroom was a painted and gilted modern center table with a marble top, in addition to the main attraction at the rear of the room: the pipe organ.

Above the fireplace, on the northern wall, was one of a pair of Rococo-style giltwood and composition pier mirrors, American, mid-19th century, nine feet high.