In November 1853, Judge William Roland Harris paid $6,000 for forty acres of land located east of Memphis, and that today would be on Central Avenue in the Central Gardens Historic District.  Harris’ acreage was part of a 5,000-acre tract purchased in 1783 by John Rice; the North Carolina land act of the same year made it possible for Rice to acquire 130,000 acres in Tennessee, including the original site for the town of Memphis.  In 1830 when a land speculator defaulted on his payment to John McLemore and A. B. Carr for what was originally John Rice’s “East Memphis” tract, Solomon Rozelle shrewdly bought 803 of the acres for about $10 an acre.  Rozelle, whose land was bounded by today’s Hollywood Street, Union Avenue, Bellevue Boulevard and a dry creek south of South Parkway, sold large portions of his holdings to his sons for token amounts of money.  Judge Harris’ 40 acre purchase is the first known sale of the Rozelle family’s Central Gardens land to someone outside of the family.

According to a document by Judge Harris’ granddaughter, Evelina Harris, construction of Clanlo Hall was started in November 1853 and completed in the spring of 1854.  The photograph of the original house shows a wooden plantation style house with a tin roof and six columns with Ionic capitals.  The house also had four double-flue chimneys that were used to heat the four public rooms downstairs and the four bedrooms upstairs.  The kitchen, typical for the times, was a separate building at the rear of the house.  There were other outbuildings as well, suggesting that this was a working plantation.
    
In 1854, Judge Harris along with his wife and children moved to their new country home.  Shortly afterward, Judge Harris’ younger brother, Isham Green Harris, joined them.  Isham Harris, after losing the 1853 governor’s race to Andrew Johnson, moved from Paris, Tennessee, in order to begin practicing law in Memphis with his brother.  William Harris, a judge in the Memphis Commercial and Criminal Court, was soon appointed to the Tennessee Supreme Court, while his colorful brother decided to run for governor again.  The lively 1857 governor’s race even included a debate where a brawl broke out between Democrat Isham Harris and the Whig nominee; Harris knocked his opponent off of the stage, and the Whig candidate came up with his pistol drawn.  Harris was unharmed and won the election by 11,371 votes.                   
    
Governor Isham G. Harris moved to Nashville in 1858.  In June of that year, his brother William was aboard the steamship Pennsylvania when its boilers exploded.  The steamer was on its way up the Mississippi River from New Orleans when the explosion occurred south of Memphis.  Judge Harris was taken to Clanlo Hall where he died a few days later.  The Memphis Bar issued a “sympathy resolution” and appointed eight pallbearers for the funeral which was held at Harris’ house.  Harris’ widow, Evelina Parsons Harris, was now in charge of Clanlo.
    
After Judge Harris’ death, Evelina P. Harris owned not only Clanlo Hall and its surrounding land, but also an estate in Memphis, a second plantation in Arkansas and more than 100 acres in Shelby County.  She proved to be an astute businesswoman, surviving the Civil War and yellow fever epidemics with her land holdings and finances intact.  During the 35 years following her husband’s death, Mrs. Harris subdivided and sold some of her land, and rented most of the farmland.  She moved to a house in Memphis at 231 Hernando Street (part of the Harris estate), but retained ownership of Clanlo Hall.  During this time, Clanlo was occupied by other members of the Harris family, including none other than Isham G. Harris.  Governor Harris stayed briefly at Clanlo when he (and most of the Tennessee General Assembly) fled Nashville ahead of the Union Army in February 1862.  When the Civil War ended, the newly appointed governor of Tennessee offered a $5,000 reward for Harris’ capture.  Although Harris headed south through Alabama and Mississippi to eventually reach Mexico, one account had him traveling through Tennessee and stopping at Clanlo with $70,000 in gold taken from the state treasury.  When Harris was pardoned and subsequently returned to Memphis, he insisted that he had taken $150,000 not $70,000, but that by the end of the war he only had $3,000 left.
  
Evelina P. Harris was 77 years old when she died in 1893.  Although she owned a great deal of land worth more than $38,000, she left a very simple will.  In it she requested that her estate be divided into four equal parts, with one-fourth going to each of her three grown children; the last fourth was to be equally divided between two grandchildren, who were the children of her deceased son.  The Commissioners of the Shelby County Chancery Court spent two full days dividing Mrs. Harris’ property into four equal shares.  Since Clanlo Hall was surrounded by about 14.5 acres, the acreage was divided into lots with an approximately three acre lot drawn for the “residence and out houses on said property,” according to court documents.  The Commissioners “having divided the property up into four shares as set forth above; they drew lots between the various parties in order to ascertain to whom each share should go.”  The grandchildren, George D. Harris and Evelina Harris, received the share with Clanlo Hall and its newly reduced three acre lot.                                        
    
Evelina Harris was now half owner of the house that she had lived in since her birth in 1874.  She stayed in Clanlo Hall with her aunt and uncle, Bettie Harris Peeples and James P. Peeples, until she married in 1901.  In 1903, Mrs. Peeples, whose share had included the 4.5 acre lot west of Clanlo, bought Clanlo Hall from her niece and nephew.  Mr. and Mrs. Peeples lived in Clanlo Hall until 1911 when they sold the house for $10,000 plus another $10,000 to pay off a debt to the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company.  The sale ended 58 years of ownership by the Harris family.  
    
Dr. Bennett G. Henning, Mrs. Evelina P. Harris’ physician, was the new owner of Clanlo Hall.  He spent another $10,000 remodeling the interior and exterior of the house.  The work included changing the six Ionic capitals to Corinthian, adding porches to the east and west sides, and covering the entire wooden house with brick veneer.  The Commercial Appeal reported that this was the “first time in Memphis that a house of such a size was thus transformed.”  Dr. Henning must have wanted to keep Clanlo in his family, because in 1917 he sold the house to his son Max for $1.  In 1919, Max and his wife Charlie hired architects Jones and Furbringer for another renovation.  The east porch became a porte cochere and the west one was enclosed to form a sunroom.  The number of chimneys was reduced from four to two.  The separate plantation kitchen was attached to the house and the upstairs was enlarged to add more bedrooms.  The Hennings sold the house in 1927, and from 1927 to 1954 there were three different owners.
    
Lois Claire Schwamm, a widow with two grown daughters, purchased the house in 1954.  Up until this time the house was generally referred to as the Harris House, but the Schwamms immediately renamed the home after themselves; they combined the first two letters of Claire and Ann (the daughters) and Lois (the mother) to create the name: Clanlo.  To publicize the new name, the women made a handpainted Clanlo Hall banner that was hung on the porch “when they wished to receive visitors.”  While historians may take issue with renaming a house 100 years after it was built, the new name distinguished this house from the four or five other Harris houses in the city.  Next, the Schwamms “volunteered” the house for hosting just about every historical society, garden club and fine arts group in town.  They soon became the darlings of the society page writers and all of their parties and activities were reported on.  While the highly entertaining articles always mentioned the house and its history, the real story was the Schwamms.  An article about their gardens tells how they created a Shakespeare garden featuring each herb named in Shakespeare’s plays.  Claire Schwamm said they did this because “Shakespeare died in 1616 and that’s the address of this house.”  In the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, when most Memphians wanted a new house out east, the Schwamms helped change the city’s focus to Central Gardens in Midtown with its beautiful old homes and interesting history.  It was a campaign that any advertising executive could appreciate and envy.
    
The Schwamm sisters, having inherited the house after their mother’s death, sold Clanlo Hall and moved to Mobile, Alabama, in 1983.  A few months later the pair moved again, this time to New Orleans.  The sisters told the Memphis press that Mobile wasn’t a civilized city like Memphis.  One of their main complaints was that the grocery stores did not stock Bumblebee tuna fish, the Schwamms’ favorite brand.  Within 24 hours there were no cans of Bumblebee tuna to be found on the shelves of the Seessel’s stores on Union or Perkins.  Even from New Orleans, the Schwamm sisters could still influence their Memphis audience!
    
In 1983, Gayle and Preston Robb bought Clanlo Hall, minus most of the rear acreage, which was used to develop a Planned Unit Development with zero lot line houses.  Within a few hours of moving into the house, one of the Robbs’ daughters found the Jones and Furbringer plans for the 1919 renovation, tucked away in the eaves of the attic.  The plans were preserved in shrink wrap, and Mr. Robb, a self-described “amateur” historian, began a very professional search to document the history of Clanlo Hall.  He found all of the records on the sale of the land and house beginning with the 1828 McLemore and Carr land indenture.  The records, many in hard-to-read script, were photocopied and then transcribed using a typewriter.  Mr. Robb talked to the Schwamm sisters and discovered that they had obtained a notarized statement from Evelina Harris, Judge Harris’ granddaughter, verifying that the house was built in 1853 – 54.  A copy of Evelina Harris’ statement was added to Mr. Robb’s growing collection of historical documents.
    
During their years of ownership, Mr. and Mrs. Robb generously opened Clanlo for two different Central Gardens Home and Garden Tours, so that the public could tour one of the few remaining antebellum houses in Memphis.  This year the Robbs will celebrate 20 years of living in Clanlo Hall.  In honor of the occasion, they plan to give copies of their Clanlo collection of documents to the Memphis Room of the Memphis/Shelby County Public Library, so that it will be available to anyone who wants to enjoy reading about the 150-year history of Clanlo Hall.