It was built on land purchased in May 1838 by Robert W. Roper, a state legislator from the parish of St. Paul's, and a prominent member of the South Carolina Agricultural Society, whose income derived from his position as a cotton planter and slave holder.

[2] That same year, the authors of the nomination form for the National Register of Historic Places described the house as "exceptional...well-proportioned and architecturally sophisticated...to be preserved and protected in situ at all costs.

Short of funds, the city decided instead to subdivide the East Bay land into nine lots and sell them to pay for a smaller park along the South Battery.

[11] Ravenel built a house in 1845, its colonnade nearly as grand as Roper's, featuring four monumental columns crowned with Grecian capitals modeled after the Tower of the Winds in Athens.

Because the lot was narrow, Ravenel (or his architect) ingeniously ran a driveway through the ground floor of the house, with "the carriage entrance, running under the drawing-room.

In the summer of 1864, during the Civil War, Maj. Edward Manigault made an entry in his diary: "The Roper House has had the architectural projection of the porch blown away by a shell.

According to one writer, as a result of the blast "a six-foot-long, 2,000-pound piece of the Blakely's tube came to rest in the attic [of Roper House], where it remains to this day.

On August 31, 1886, during Siegling's tenure at Roper House, Charleston was struck by a powerful earthquake resulting in sixty deaths, and tremendous damage to the city's structures.

Next door, the portico of William Ravenel's house collapsed, but Roper House suffered minor damage — the east and north facades cracked, requiring patching and anchorage, but the monumental portico escaped unscathed; the Charleston city engineer pronounced it to be in "good" condition.

In 1968, Drayton Hastie sold the house to Richard Jenrette but reserved a life tenancy on the main floor for his mother.

Over the next two years, he engaged the decorative painter Robert Jackson to marbleize the walls, installed blue and gold curtains, put down Scalamandré carpeting, furnished the principal rooms with a suite of Duncan Phyfe furniture, and hung portraits of George Washington and Andrew Jackson over the mantels.