Pennington, S. A., House - Elton, LA
N 30° 28.748 W 092° 41.688
15R E 529293 N 3371918
Beautiful Queen Anne Revival styled home, located in the small town of Elton. Privately owned.
Waymark Code: WMF3ZJ
Location: Louisiana, United States
Date Posted: 08/19/2012
Views: 1
Appeared to be in wonderfully restored condition. This home really stood out, and was quite easy to find and photograph. Queen Anne Revival home was built c. 1911. Located on a quiet street in the small rice field areas of western Louisiana, it was a nice treat to find. Great information on the historical note of this home was found at the Louisiana Register page, located
here, which states:
The S. A. Pennington House is locally significant in the area of architecture because it
makes an important contribution to the distinctly Queen Anne Revival architectural heritage of
Jefferson Davis Parish.
The State Historic Preservation Office considers Jefferson Davis Parish to be one of three
centers of Queen Anne Revival architecture in the state outside New Orleans. (The other two are
the nearby towns of Lake Charles in Calcasieu Parish and Crowley in Acadia Parish). In Jeff Davis
Parish, the greatest concentration of Queen Anne homes is in Jennings. In addition to the
Pennington House in Elton, there are four noteworthy examples of the style in Lake Arthur in
southern Jeff Davis Parish.
Although Pennington himself was from Mississippi, the majority of Jeff Davis Parish's
settlers were Midwesterners attracted to the area by railroad recruiters who extolled the agricultural
possibilities of Southwestern Louisiana. The houses these Midwesterners built, on the whole, do not
resemble the typical Queen Anne Revival house in the state, but instead are more like the national
norm. The standard Queen Anne residence in Louisiana is a one or one-and-a-half story
conservatively styled cottage with a polygonal bay and perhaps some shingling and gable peak
ornamentation. By contrast, Jeff Davis Parish had a heavy concentration of two and two-and-a-half
story Queen Anne houses, reflecting the Victorian fondness for marked verticality. These houses
also tended to be more elaborately ornamented and massed than was typical in Louisiana -- i.e.,
resembling more closely textbook examples of the style. It should be noted that this special heritage
represents the parish's architectural apogee. The surviving building stock in Jeff Davis Parish
reveals that there has not been an architectural flowering since then, with the exception of a few
notable landmarks. In short, the parish's Queen Anne Revival houses are its architectural identity,
so-to-speak.......
Dr. S. A. Pennington is credited as Elton's first resident physician. Educated at the
University of Tennessee at Nashville, he received his M.D. degree in early 1900. After completing a
post graduate course at the New York Graduate School of Medicine in 1905, he opened a practice
in Jacoby, Louisiana. Two years later, Pennington moved to Elton, where he remained for eleven years. In addition to his medical duties, he served as State Representative for two terms and was a
delegate to the 1913 state constitutional convention. After leaving Elton, Pennington spent three
years in New Orleans before opening an office in Baton Rouge. In 1920 he relocated to Port Arthur
but died in 1922 before moving his family there. Pennington's youngest daughter lived in the Elton
home until approximately two years ago. The house now serves as the parsonage of the First
Baptist Church of Elton.