The house at 701 Sixteenth Street was part of the James Cowan Estate that UT purchased in 1920 for $61,000 from the widow of its successive owner, Daniel Briscoe Sr., who purchased the house in 1899 and moved into it in 1901.
The Briscoe property was purchased with a portion of the Benjamin Rush Strong bequest in order to have a site upon which to build the women’s dormitory named for his mother (Sophronia Strong) as specified in the will. The main house was used as a women’s dormitory and then as sorority chapter rooms, offices, and an archaeology museum. The main house was raised in 1954 for the construction of Clement Hall.
According to UT archaeologists who investigated the property in 2000 and 2001, the house at 701 Sixteenth Street was probably the gardener’s home because of the three large greenhouses (which were found to have been next to it) and was built in 1879. It is a one-and-a-half-story house built in the Folk Victorian style with a cross-gabled roof, decorative wooden cornices, segmented arches on the windows, and gabled dormers on the upper floor. It is constructed of handmade, possibly repressed brick laid in American Common Bond with six stretcher courses separated by one header course. It served as the home of various UT instructors and staff until 1940, when Foster G. and Edna Deaver Arnett rented the house. Arnett died in 1945, but his widow continued to live there until 1985. She rented two of the upstairs bedrooms to graduate students and regularly entertained women from Sophronia Strong Hall for tea. She was profoundly deaf but was an excellent lip reader.
Following the death of Edna Arnett, UT reassumed possession of the house. It was assigned to UT Sports Clubs for storage and deteriorated to the point that it could no longer be used even for that purpose. When Vice Chancellor Philip Scheurer indicated that the house was not useful to the university because of its small size and the difficulty of bringing it up to code and that it would therefore be razed, strong community sentiment and efforts by UT archaeologists led to its being boarded up until such time as it was feasible to restore it. Its restoration was included as part of the project to convert Sophronia Strong Hall from a residence hall to a major academic facility.