Certainly inspired by George Washington’s Virginia home, Mt Vernon, was built circa 1933. At the time it was the last house out on the Woodley Road as you headed off to Troy. Hardie was one of the owners of the highly successful McGehee Brothers Drug Store located downtown on the first block of Dexter. A few years later, Hardie’s brother William McGehee built a mansion next door at 2311 Woodley. My one-time brother-in-law owned the latter home a decade ago. It was in the late 1960s, I think, when the City decided to rename the Troy Highway (which branched off the Woodley Road a block past the two McGehee mansions) for the McGehee family. And it was about this time that McGehee Estates subdivision was developed on the heavily wooded acreage that lay behind the two houses. Lots of dots.

-Charles Humphries