Architects, as well as the casual visitor, are stunned by the "audacious bulk" of this magnificent house which somehow manages to be the house of grace, beauty and distinction. They marvel that it sits so forthrightly and imperiously on the street. They do not realize that in early days, there was no Liberty Street and the house had a wide lane in front leading to Main Street (then the Augusta Rd and now the Robert Toombs Avenue).

Architects and visitors also marvel that two houses could so successfully be put side by side to form one great townhouse. The two front doors with their arched settings, the fanlights and the broad, dentiled entablature catch the eye. The two Federal houses were joined with a wide hall and unified by the addition of the Doric peristyle colonnade and the wrap-around piazza.

The history of the house is well documented. In 1787, the town commissioners sold this land to William Stith, one of the first judges in Georgia. When the honorable Duncan Campbell came to Washington in 1807 to teach in the Young Ladies' Academy, he bought the existing cottage and began its enlargement. It was here, in the eastern section of the house, that US Supreme Court Justice Archibald Campbell was born in 1811.

Andrew Green Semmes, of the distinguished Baltimore family, bought the house in 1817 and it was probably his son, Judge Albert Gallatin Semmes, who saw to the design of the western part of the edifice. Aaron A. Cleveland (1841) probably added the colonnade. He bought the house from Chenoth Peteet who bought it in 1820. In 1866, Benjamin F. Jordan owned the property. It was the John and Willis Lindsey Home for more than fifty years.