One of Mobile’s oldest Mardi Gras organizations has ambitious plans for one of the city’s most historic buildings. The 1845 Protestant Children’s Home near downtown Mobile is set for a multimillion-dollar restoration that will transform the former orphanage into a private meeting lodge.
The 2.4-acre property at 911 Dauphin Street, near the Broad Street intersection, is owned by the nonprofit Historic Restoration Society, led by David J. Cooper Sr., a former president of the Mobile Carnival Association. The society purchased the site for $440,000 and has begun a roughly $3 million restoration of the main building and a second wing added in 1950. Once complete, the property will be leased to the Infant Mystics, a Mardi Gras society founded in 1867, and renamed “Cotton Hall” in a nod to the group’s founders, many of whom worked as cotton merchants, traders, bankers and clerks during a time when the cotton trade was a driving force in Mobile’s economy.
Jay Roberds of NAI Mobile, who is coordinating the restoration, called the property one of the city’s last sizable historic buildings still available for renovation. Designed by Philadelphia architect Henry Moffatt and built for about $4,000, the three-story structure originally housed 17 orphans when it opened in response to the large number of children left parentless after Mobile’s 1839 yellow fever epidemic. The Protestant Orphan Asylum Society, founded in 1840 by women from several downtown churches, ran the home for well over a century.
The building operated as an orphanage until 1970, when the Alabama Baptist Children’s Home assumed management and relocated children to a new campus in west Mobile. Leo Straughn, who lived at the home in the 1960s and 70s after his parents divorced, recalled around 80 children living there when he arrived with his siblings in 1963. He described dormitory-style rooms housing 15 to 20 children each, heart-pine floors, and a strict daily routine that included supervised study halls and long walks to school on Dauphin Street.
Since its orphanage days ended, the building has passed through several uses. It became home to Mobile City College in the 1970s after being added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, then Mobile Business College in the 1985, followed by office space for the Mobile County Department of Human Resources beginning in 1991. Its second wing served briefly as a nursing home before the property later housed international workers training with the Retirement Systems of Alabama. In recent years it has sat vacant.
Cooper said the restoration will benefit more than just the Infant Mystics, describing it as a chance to create an attractive landmark in a once-neglected part of downtown. Other Mobile Carnival Association societies will be able to rent Cotton Hall for weddings, birthday parties and fundraising events once work is finished. Neighboring business owners have welcomed the project. “It’s going to be great for the area,” said Taylor Atchison, co-owner of a furniture and interior design business next door. “You never know what can happen to a big property like that; it can really define a neighborhood.”