The Swedish House at Connemara was built in the early 1850s by Christopher G. Memminger (1803- 1889), a wealthy lawyer and politician from Charleston who later became secretary of the treasury for the Confederate States of America. After his death, his heirs sold the estate, which was then known as Rock Hill, to trustees for Mary Fleming Gregg (1839- died after 1900). Her husband, William H. Gregg, Jr. (1834- 1895), was the son of the famed William H. Gregg, Sr., builder of one of the South's earliest textile mills, at Graniteville, South Carolina, in the 1840s. In 1900, Mary Fleming Gregg sold Rock Hill to Ellison Adger Smyth (1847- 1942), "dean of the Southern textile industry," according to his obituary in the New York Times.