Captain Hardy B. Smith (1841-1912), a Confederate veteran from Laurens County, served in the Army of Northern Virginia under General Robert E. Lee after being called home from the University of Georgia when war broke out and being elected first sergeant of Company H, the Blackshear Guards, of the 14th Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment. As a second lieutenant he was wounded at Mechanicsville and lost his right arm, yet continued serving for two more years before resigning his commission in April 1864 to become an enrolling officer for Georgia’s 5th District. After the war he led the Smith Camp of the United Confederate Veterans and rose to brigadier general and commander of the Eastern Division, while also serving as a public servant, farmer, and businessman, including as clerk and treasurer of the Superior Court, judge of the Court of Ordinary, and an original stockholder in the Macon and Dublin Railroad. He married Ella Few Douglas in 1867, and they raised ten children in this house; she, her mother, her sister, and four other women founded the First Methodist Church, and in 1887 he donated the land next to the house for the church. Smith completed the Carpenter Gothic house in 1873 on a small farm, and it remains the oldest home in Dublin still on its original site. Set on flint-rock piers brought from the Oconee River and shaded by magnolias he planted, the house has steep gables, ornate barge boards, dormers, striking chimney tops, clustered columns, heavy timber framing, and board-and-batten construction of heart pine. Its first floor contains the master bedroom, a drawing room, and two smaller rooms, while upstairs three bedrooms are connected by a spiral staircase whose inner wall was built by a cooper from two-inch boards like barrel staves. The kitchen stood at the rear to reduce fire risk and keep stove heat out of the main residence; after the original kitchen burned around the turn of the 20th century, it was replaced in a style consistent with the original design. The house also includes a built-in shallow well and casing in the breezeway, was later saved from destruction through private donations and grants, and is now a private residence.