#140: The Abraham Minus Home on Jones Street
"I cannot invest in the hope of a solid wire being able to carry a voice."
—Abraham Minus (1875)
The Abraham Minus Home on Jones Street
This fabulous house, the Abraham Minus home, constructed in 1859 for a successful Savannah merchant, is located at 204 East Jones Street. Historically, Jones has long been one of the city's most prominent and charming streets in the Historic District of Savannah.
The home was designed in the Italianate style by architect Decatur Button, well known in his day for works in Philadelphia and New Jersey. The street was named after local Savannah hero Major John Jones, who served during the 1779 British siege of Savannah during the American Revolutionary War.
I've painted en Plein air several of the fabulous historic homes well preserved on Jones Street, including the beautiful Jones Street Row Houses (PSF #69), the Alexander Augustus Smets Home (PFS #107), the Noah Knapp House (PFS #136), and the gorgeous Eliza Thompson House (PFS #137).
The original Minus family landed in Savannah on July 10, 1733, on the ship William and Sarah. Abraham and Abigail Minus and their two young daughters, Leah and Esther, were among the first Jewish families to immigrate to Georgia. They arrived from London, England, with 38 other Jewish settlers.
This group of immigrants had escaped the Spanish Inquisition, some originating in Spain and Portugal, while the Minus family were among the two German-Jewish families seeking the promise of religious freedom and a renewed economic opportunity in Georgia. Only six months earlier, General James Oglethorpe selected a bluff overlooking the Savannah River as the founding site of the new colony.
All the Jewish immigrants the Minus family sailed with had traveled to the new colony without an official invite from the Georgia Trustees back in England. But Georgia Colony founder James Oglethorpe offered them a little land and a lot of hope in Savannah. A few years later, this original group of Ashkenazi Jews formed what became the Congregation Michve Israel (see PFS #20).
Abigail Minus became an influential member of Savannah's Jewish Community. Between 1733 and 1748, she gave birth to seven more children. She was 47 years old when her final child was born in 1748. Her husband Abraham did well as a merchant but died in 1757, leaving Abigail at age fifty-six with an enormous burden of raising a large family.
But Abigail Minus became one of the great businesswomen in Georgia's history, albeit with the assistance of nineteen enslaved Africans. She managed to expand the estate her husband left by several thousand acres. Within a few years, she opened the Minus Tavern to great success, earning a steady source of revenue for many years to support additional land purchases and business opportunities.
Abigail supported the Liberty Boys fighting for the Revolution but left the city when the Americans failed to retake the city from the British. She returned in 1787 to reopen her tavern, living to age 93. Her daughter, Leah Minus, interviewed President George Washington during his visit to the city in 1791.
After the grandson of Abigail and Abraham Minus built his home on Jones Street, he and his wife, Lavinia, began to spend summers in Nova Scotia. One summer, Abraham met the great inventor Alexander Graham Bell and was offered an opportunity to invest in Bell's telephone, but he turned it down. "I cannot invest in the hope of a solid wire being able to carry a voice," was Abraham Minus's final decision. With 20/20 hindsight, that turned out to be a bad call.
Members of the Minus family were founding members of Congregation Michve Israel, the Hibernian Society, and the Oglethorpe Club (see PFS # 75), all important institutions in Savannahian history.
5” x 7”
Oil on Canvas Painting
Painted on Location
Original Piece from my current Postcards from Savannah Series.
