Colonel Montgomery Gilbreath House

Colonel Montgomery Gilbreath House. . Montgomery Gilbreath had this board-and-batten house constructed prior to the beginning of the Civil War. Its design is probably based on one of the published house plans of famed landscape gardener and architect A.J. Downing (1815-1852) of Newburgh, NY. Colonel Gilbreath was elected probate judge of Marshall County in 1850 and served until 1862. He then joined the Confederacy, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel with the 49th Alabama Infantry. When the Yankees invaded Guntersville in 1865 and began to burn it, several leading men of the town, including Colonel Gilbreath, met with the Federal officers and pleaded with them to spare then city. Because of their intervention and perhaps because colonel Gilberth was a Mason (as was the commander of the Federal forces), this house was among only seven buildings spared. The house did sustain slight damage from a Yankee cannon ball that was fired from a bluff north of the river. Colonel Gilbreath was active in various business and political affairs of the town. In 1857 he was a trustee of the proposed Tennessee and Coosa Railroad and was elected as a delegate to the 1876 State Constitution Convention. Colonel Gilbreath was born in 1814 in East Tennessee and married Temple Jane Kilfoyle in 1844. They had ten children--Mary, Sally, Emmet, Edwin, Gordon, Catherine, Alexander, Albert Sidney, John, and Montgomery Jr. Colonel Gilbreath died October 8, 1885 and his wife died January 9, 1898. Both are buried in City Cemetery. Several descendants of the Gilbreaths still reside in the area: The Guntersville Historical Society purchased the house in 2001 and in 2003 it was placed on the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage.