Mason Croft Estate and Manson in Sumter SC

Charles T. Mason House, Sumter South Carolina

Date added: September 10, 2025

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The Charles T. Mason House is an outstanding example of the Neoclassical Revival style built on the outskirts of Sumter around 1905. Mason built an ornate Victorian house on South Main Street in Sumter in 1891. The Mason Croft House superseded this earlier residence. His second house was built on a 126.5-acre tract on the outskirts of Sumter, which he acquired in 1904. There, he built the Neoclassical Revival house which was considered a mansion by the people of Sumter, both then and now. It is one of four large Neoclassical Revival houses that remain in the city of Sumter. The house was so remarkable upon his death in 1928 that it was described in his obituary as "one of the showplaces of Sumter county."

The house was built with the finest of materials. Some of the interior woods were reportedly imported from Greece. His vision for the property was on a grand scale for Sumter, which is and was a town of gracious old homes on moderately-sized lots. Mason's 126.5-acre tract lay west of the town, bound by the then-unfinished West Calhoun Street. He chose a location for the house at the northern reaches of the property near Shot Pouch Creek, waters of the Pocataligo River. There, he created a pond and surrounded his home with beautifully landscaped grounds. The 126.5-acre tract remained intact until his death in 1928, after which all but twenty-five acres surrounding the house was divided into streets and lots, becoming one of Sumter's early bungalow suburbs of the 1930s and 1940s.

By 1948, the twenty-five acres around the house had been further subdivided into lots, leaving approximately ten acres around the Mason residence. In the ensuing years, the suburbs of Sumter steadily marched westward beyond the Mason enclave, leaving it as one of the few large in-town estates.

Charles T. Mason was the son of Charles Thomas Mason, Sr. (b. 1829) and his first wife, Judith Grier Britton. His father was renowned in Sumter as a watchmaker and inventor. Mason Sr.'s inventions included a low-cost gas for fueling gas light, which was made from waste grease. He was also the superintendent of the telegraph service of the Confederate States of America and manufactured the telegraphic instruments used throughout the Confederate States in Sumter. Other inventions included an electric fan, a burglar alarm used by banks, and a method of non-magnetizing wrist watches.

Charles T. Mason, Jr. inherited his father's penchant for inventions. In 1869, when he was twelve years old, Charles Jr. received a silver medal in the Fair of the Agricultural and Mechanical Society of South Carolina. His award prompted the Scientific American to highlight him in an article as the "Remarkable Boy Mechanic." At age 16, he left Sumter to work in the machine shops of George Page & Co. in Baltimore, Md., and later he became department foreman for Farquhars Agricultural Works in York, Pa. He eventually returned home to Sumter, opening his own machine shops, said to be the best south of Philadelphia, Pa. All of his machinery was electrically powered. In 1880, he invented a cotton picking machine that distinguished between fibrous and non-fibrous materials. The Southern Bivouac wrote of his cotton harvester in 1886, stating that many harvesters had been invented on paper, but only Charles Mason's machine was a success in reality. Consequently, Mason formed the Mason Cotton Harvester Company. The machines he produced could harvest 4,000 pounds of cotton a day. He was a bit ahead of his time, for labor was plentiful and cheap; it was not until years later that cotton harvesters replaced manual workers. Later harvesters worked on the same principle used in Mason's machine.

In 1899, Mason organized the Sumter Telephone Manufacturing Company, one of the largest in the United States. He employed as many as 400 workers and shipped telephones worldwide. The company was later sold to Western Electric, a subsidiary of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.

Mason also organized the Three M Magneto Company, which manufactured magnetos used to start airplanes during World War I. This company was later sold to Splitdorf Electrical Company.

Charles Mason died on December 27^th, 1928, at the age of 73, leaving his property to his second wife, Edith Evans Mason, sons C. Stewart Mason and Carl F. Mason, daughter Emma Mason Friar, and grandson Charles Mason Crowson.

Sumter was founded in 1800 as the seat of Sumter District, which then included Lee Sumter and Clarendon Counties. The town grew slowly and remained concentrated around Main Street until c. 1870, when residential neighborhoods began to spread west of the town, down West Calhoun and West Hampton Streets and north on North Main Street, as well as south toward the railroad tracks. By 1902, the town remained within a one-mile radius of the intersection of Liberty and Main Streets.

The new suburbs that grew around the business district of Sumter represented the prosperity that the citizens of this small town realized after ca. 1870. The largest town in this rural, agricultural county, Sumter was the center of commerce and transportation. Sumter became a manufacturing center for furniture and telephones and did a booming business in livery. Cotton manufacturing and turpentine production were large industries, as were cotton oil and fertilizer. Timber increasingly became an important industry after the turn of the twentieth century.

In the 1880s, Sumter became a railroad hub when several lines converged at the Sumter depot on the south side of the town. This increased manufacturing opportunities as well as brought travelers seeking accommodations to the town. Amenities in Sumter improved greatly during the 1880s. In 1883, the town had ten miles of elevated sidewalks made of rammed clay with wooden curbs. In 1889, the Sumter Electric Light Company was chartered, and on November 1^st of that year, the whole city was lit by electric lights for the first time. In 1892, the first city-wide water works was put in place. The small country town moved into the twentieth century with a progressive mindset. Charles T. Mason was responsible for much of that progressive thought through his work in electricity, telephones, and agricultural inventions.

Property Description

The Charles T. Mason House, historically known as Mason Croft, is a 2 and 1/2 story Neoclassical Revival house located at 111 Mason Croft in Sumter, S. C. Built after 1904, the brick house has a full-height portico supported by fluted columns with Corinthian capitals. The hipped roof is covered in terra cotta tiles. The front facade has a gabled dormer with cornice returns and a Palladian window. The interior of the house is distinguished by high-style woodwork. The house is surrounded by 10.5 acres of the original 126.5-acre tract in the older suburbs of Sumter, S.C. The house and associated outbuildings rest among its historical landscape, which includes old plantings and trees, a goldfish pond, and a circular drive. The property has been restored and is in excellent condition.

The front elevation of the Charles T. Mason House is three-ranked with a centrally located door on both the first and second stories. Each door is flanked by a 1/1 sash window. The door on the first floor projects on to the full-height entry porch and gives entry to a small foyer, which then leads into the main hallway. This door is flanked by a set of square columns that support a balcony at the second floor. Both central doors on the front elevation are double glass doors. The first-floor door has a beveled glass transom. The second-floor door has a plain transom and side lights. The house has four interior brick chimneys with corbelled caps.

The cornice of the full-height front porch has dentil molding and is bracketed. It is supported by 6 massive fluted columns with Corinthian capitals and pilasters with Corinthian capitals at each side of the front elevation. A one-story porch supported by round Tuscan columns wraps around the western and eastern facades of the house. A porte cochere projects from the western facade.

The eastern facade of the house is five-ranked with a set of 1/1 sash windows flanking a smaller central window on each floor. The western facade is asymmetrically five-ranked. The northern, or rear, facade originally had a rear door with a hipped gable above it, which is now obscured by a sympathetic one-story addition that extends the rear of the house several feet. Like the eastern and western facades, the addition has a one-story porch supported by round Tuscan columns. It has a centrally placed door with four consecutive 1/1 sash windows on each side. The addition is topped by a baluster with square posts and has a low brick chimney.

The interior of the house is arranged around a central hallway, which runs the length of the original part of the house. The hall is entered through the front foyer and is flanked by two front parlors. The hallway and parlors are defined by a row of Corinthian columns on pedestals, and the floor plan is open. The hallway contains the staircase, which rises from the rear of the hallway to the second floor. The rear of the original part of the house contains a dining room and kitchen on the western side and a den on the eastern side. The one-story addition at the rear of the house contains a den.

The garage at the Charles T. Mason House appears to have been built at the same time as the house. It has a hipped roof and an entrance for cars on the front, or southern elevation of the building. It is located just west of the rear of the house.

The playhouse is located some distance west of the house. It is a small, square brick building with a gable-end roof clad in terra cotta tiles. It has a centrally placed door on its eastern facade and centrally placed 1/1 sash windows on the southern and western elevations. Each window has wooden shutters and a window box below the sill. The gable end is clad in weatherboard.