I Pledge Allegiance to THIS HOUSE

How a Charleston visionary came to love the demanding landmark she never wanted in the first place.

- JASON KYLE HOWARD

Two days before Christmas the streets of historic Charleston are quiet. A cold front-at least, cold by Southern standards has descended on the city. The tourists gawking at the colorful houses on Rainbow Row are bundled in puffer jackets and mittens, while the locals have retreated to the warmth of indoors. But inside the Parker-Drayton House, at 6 Gibbes Street, near Charleston's southwest tip, it's more than slightly chilly. There is no central heating in this 220-year-old mansion. But then, the owner is a hardy person.

Now in her eighties, Penny Patton remains gamine and graceful, with a streak of wildness that has always coursed through her. Growing up in New Jersey's horse country, she could ride while standing on her mount's back at age 10. A decade later, vacationing with her family in Cuba, she ran off with President Fulgencio Batista's soldiers at the close of Fidel Castro's revolution, leaving her father fuming. In 1970, on a trip south with her husband Grant, the couple fell in love with Charleston. They moved from Boston, where he had attended Harvard Medical School, and bought the Parker-Drayton House, a 7,970-square-foot wonder perched on 0.56 acres smack in the heart of the city.