Kershaw Health

The Greenleaf Villa, Home of The Hospital Foundation

The Greenleaf Villa was built by Samuel Flake about 1810. It is the only surviving Charleston-style “double house” in Camden, and the only house with a Dutch gable roof on the street side. Like all Charleston-style houses, the front of the house faces extensive gardens to the side, and not the street. Delicately fluted free-standing wooden columns rise from the ground floor to the top of the second story piazza, and carpenter’s lace ornaments the roof at the front and sides. 

In 1826, the house was acquired by Dr. Lee, a cousin of General Robert E. Lee, who used it as a hospital. During the Civil War, the house was became an emergency hospital for wounded Confederate soldiers arriving on trains from the battlefields.

From the late 1800s through the early 1900s, the home was owned by the Baum family, who added porches which wrap three sides of the house. They also added elegant parquet floors – made from trees cut on their Kershaw County farm – in the entry hall. The house was originally home of Mannes Baum, a Jewish merchant who emigrated from Prussia to South Carolina.

He was instrumental in bringing Simon Baruch to Camden from Prussia, and employed him as a bookkeeper in his general store. It was Baum who helped to teach the elder Baruch English and who financed his education at the South Carolina Medical College and the Medical College of Virginia. After serving as a physician in the Civil War, Dr. Baruch opened a medical practice in Camden and built a home just up the street from Baum’s home at the Greenleaf Villa. When his son Bernard was born, Dr. Baruch used the name of his friend and benefactor as the boy’s middle name. Bernard Mannes Baruch became a successful financier in New York and presidential advisor. It was his generosity that established the first hospital in Camden in 1913.

After the house passed from the Baum family in 1928, it served many functions, including a residence, antiques store, tea room and real estate offices. In the 1970s The Greenleaf Villa by acquired by Alice Boykin, who undertook a major restoration. In late 2008, The Greenleaf Villa became the home of The Hospital Foundation