Historic Riverfront Mott House on Ga. Campus Destroyed

Sept. 07--The Calhoun-Griffin-Mott House, the last remaining Chattahoochee riverfront mansion between Columbus and the Gulf of Mexico, was destroyed Sunday morning in a fire that took more than 40 firefighters to bring under control.

Commonly called the Mott House, it was owned by TSYS and was under a nearly $4 million renovation at the time of the fire. The company was planning to put a conference center and boardroom in the structure. The project started almost a year ago and scheduled to be completed in April 2015. The house was built in 1841, survived the Civil War and the expansion of riverfront textile millls.

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The fire was reported to authorities just before 2:30 a.m., said Columbus Fire and Emergency Medical Services Fire Inspector Danny Irons. The fire was brought under control about 3:45 a.m. No firefighters were seriously injured.

Sgt. Mark McMullen of the Columbus Police Department was among the first people on the scene. He was patrolling downtown and saw the smoke and arrived about 2:35 a.m.

"When I first saw it, I thought it was the TSYS building," McMullen said.

Fire department Battalion Chief Bobby Dutton said firefighters had some issues early on because the house was in a construction zone. They had to pull hoses to the scene from hydrants across 14th street near the Frank Martin Pedestrian Bridge.

"The access to getting the trucks back here was difficult," Dutton said. "We had to stretch a lot of lines."

The cause of the fire was not immediately known, Dutton said.

Firefighters used a ladder truck to pump water down on the house for more than 45 minutes. Just after 3 a.m., the building was fully engulfed in flames and firefighters were in a defensive position, Dutton said.

The TSYS parking garage abuts the structure and firefighters were fighting the fire from the third floor of the parking garage. Dutton, a veteran firefighter, said it is the first time he can recall fighting an fire from the inside out of a parking deck.

"I don't think we have ever done that before," he said.

The parking deck and the main TSYS buildings did not appear to be damaged in the fire, Dutton said.

"The main building was never in danger, but we were concerned about the parking garage," Dutton said.

The fire appeared to start in the southeast corner of the structure, Dutton said. "That is where the most flames were," he said.

At least eight trucks from four stations responded to the fire.

Several TSYS executives were on the scene about 3:30 a.m. Senior Communications Director Rob Ward said there was a small workforce on the campus at the time of the fire and no one was injured.

"We are very early in this process," Ward said. "And we will be working with fire officials and law enforcement to make a determination as to what happened. We really have no idea at this time."

The renovation work was being done by Thayer-Bray Construction. The house and the property immediately surrounding it were fenced in.

Earlier this year TSYS Chairman Phil Tomlinson talked about the renovations to the Mott House.

"We're going to move our boardroom over there and we are going to have seven or eight big meeting rooms that we can use," Tomlinson said. "... It will be the most high-tech old house in the world, I promise you. It's going to have more internet capacity and technology than any building that size we've ever built."

In the 1950s there were a number of mansions along the river in downtown Columbus. The house, which will have about 13,000 square feet of interior space after the renovation, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

"Apparently there were about 10 of them on this riverbank right along where this campus sits," Tomlinson said in March. "If you read the history of it, they called it Golden Row. People liked to build along the river because it was a lot cooler in the summertime."

When the land was acquired to built the TSYS campus in the 1990s, many people did not know the Mott House was still standing because it was encapsulated by the Fieldcrest Mill that was taken down to make room for the TSYS headquarters.

"When we started taking those mills down, brick by brick, we found that the Mott House was encapsulated into one of those mills," Tomlinson said in the March interview. "Rick Ussery, who was CEO at the time, and I didn't know it was here. Apparently some people did know it but not anybody that was working on getting this property abated, if you will."

The house has a rich and long history, including a role in the last land battle of the Civil War in 1865. The the Mott house served as the headquarters of the Union General James H. Wilson.

It was originally constructed and inhabited by James S. Calhoun, the second mayor of Columbus who left the city in 1851 to take the job as the first governor of the New Mexico Territory. The sweeping expanse included what is now Arizona and a portion of Colorado.

Calhoun also served in the Georgia state senate and as the U.S. consul in Havana, Cuba, during his career. He died in 1852 while traveling back home to the East.

The Mott House also was the residence of Columbus businessmen Daniel Griffin and Randolph Lawler Mott, the latter a serial entrepreneur, Union sympathizer and Columbus mayor pro tem. He purchased it in 1856, but was killed after falling in front of a train in Atlanta in 1881.

"We are devastated to lose this landmark," Ward said as the firefights battled the last hot spots about 4 a.m. "This building has been such a part of the history of Columbus."

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