Standing on South Powell Street in Union Springs, Alabama, sits a two-story house with four Corinthian columns across the front.
William Walton Rainer had it built between 1902 and 1904. It has 12 rooms and a stained-glass window over the stairs. His widow was still living there in 1930, and a string of owners followed.
The last residents moved to Georgia in 2015. Nobody has lived in the house since. Rain has been getting in through the roof.
Photographs from 2021 show stained ceilings and fallen plaster. The balusters, pocket doors, and stained glass are still in place. The house is off market, and no restoration has been confirmed.
A future bank president bought the lot in 1889
In 1889 William Walton Rainer bought a lot on South Powell Street in Union Springs, Alabama. Dr. K. W. Jones's house was standing on it.
Whether that house came down, was moved, or ended up inside the later work, the record doesn't say.
Rainer could afford it.
Born in 1853, he went to business school in Baltimore, farmed on a large scale, and ran the Merchants and Farmers Bank for more than 20 years.
Union Springs had money and no river route. Cotton left by wagon for Columbus, Georgia, until the railroads reached town.
The families who ran the banks and the stores built their houses on Prairie, Powell, and Chunnenuggee.
Two years of work, four Corinthian columns
Work started in 1902 and finished in 1904, at 202 South Powell Street.
Four Corinthian columns carry the front, rising two full stories to the roofline, with carved acanthus leaves at the top.
A balcony opens off the second floor between the middle columns.
The house is wood. The yellow siding and white trim in modern photographs may not be the 1904 scheme.
Side porches gave shade in an Alabama summer, tall windows and doors pulled air through before air conditioning, and the front porch kept rain off most of the first-floor wall.
The columns and roof edges got no such cover.
Property websites put the floor area anywhere from 5,000 to 6,500 square feet, and some date it to 1800. The old count of 12 rooms holds up better.
The stair window doesn't match the porch
The staircase window is the surprise.
Its central female figure sits inside a curving border of leaves and flowers, Art Nouveau work in a house that is classical everywhere else.
The hall is built around that stair: turned balusters, square newel posts, paneled walls climbing to the landing.
In one main room, Corinthian columns run floor to ceiling and frame the fireplace, under a carved coffered ceiling, with a curved bay pushing out from the wall.
Tall pocket doors join the reception rooms, so the household could throw two rooms into one for a crowd and shut them again for an ordinary Tuesday.
Upstairs, bedrooms with fireplaces and a claw-foot tub. The kitchen cabinets came later.
The 17-year-old in the story
Some accounts credit Sterling Price Rainer Jr. with the house.
He was born in January 1885, which made him 17 the year the work began and 19 the year it ended.
William fits the facts.
He owned the land, he had the income for 12 rooms, and in January 1903 he was set to occupy the Ellis residence on Conecuh Street while the new house went up.
No architect or contractor has been named.
The mix-up is easy to explain.
Several Rainers owned large houses in town at once, including Sterling Sr.'s Queen Anne on Chunnenuggee Avenue, and a family name without a street address turns three houses into one story.
From the Rainers to the Lewises
William and Celia Rainer had 25 years in the house. By 1929 he was called the largest planter in Bullock County.
Celia stayed on, was there in 1930, and her time in the house ended in 1931.
Then the paper trail thins out. Nothing solid surfaces until 1971, when John Wiley Springer is listed at the address.
He had come during the Depression, worked in lumber, and served a term in the Alabama House.
D. F. Masters held it by 1980, the Mertzes after that, and Helen and Frances Masters in 1993.
Albert Lewis and Joice Bailey-Lewis took it over in 1994 and kept it 15 years.
She was the first woman to run the Bullock County schools, and their surname is the likely source of the Lewis in the name people use now.
Sold for $70,000, empty by 2015
The house sold in October 2012 for $70,000. The buyer found it online and moved in for her retirement after years with the Veterans Administration.
She repaired and furnished parts of it around 2013. Photographs show furnished rooms, the woodwork and stained glass intact, with cabinets, heaters, and bathroom fittings in place.
The outer shell deteriorated later, which is the part that counts when it rains.
In 2015 the household moved to Alma, Georgia, to be nearer family, and nobody has lived at 202 South Powell Street since.
Furniture, clothing, and pictures stayed behind. Online accounts read that as a sudden flight, though the move was planned.
What the 2021 photographs show
The water had been getting in for years.
Stains ran across upper-floor ceilings, plaster had come down in bedrooms and the kitchen, and vines crossed the porch and got in through the openings.
Much of the finish work is still there: balusters, coffered ceiling, pocket doors, stained glass, mantels, floors.
None of that says anything about the joists and rafters behind wet plaster.
In 2022 a neighbor said a contractor had bought the place to restore it as a home.
No name or deed date has followed, and the equipment parked nearby that February belonged to the job next door.
A February 2026 street image showed it still neglected.
As of August 2026 the house sits off market, with no active sale or rental listing.
It is a vacant private house on South Powell Street, with no confirmed restoration.
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