RALEIGH – The Wilbur and Martha Carter House in Greensboro, built in 1951, is one of North Carolina’s most recent additions to the National Register of Historic Places. The ’50s period modernist dwelling fits the profile of many 1950s vintage boomers: trendsetting and with a humanistic strain.
It was one of 56 properties nominated in 2008 and brings to 2,678 the number of North Carolina properties on the National Register. A school, cemetery, farm houses, and other properties are among the state’s listings now protected as national treasures. The properties also offer tax credits to individuals, plus cultural authenticity to communities and can serve as economic assets and magnets for tourists. Learn more at http://www.nps.gov/history/nr/ and http://www.hpo.ncdcr.gov/nrhome.htm.
The Carter House, the first modernist house in Greensboro, was designed by Edward Lowenstein and much influenced by Usonian designs of renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright. These houses were designed to control costs and had no attics, basements, and little ornamentation. Find information at www.franklloydwright.org. The broad, low slung Carter House features a glass-walled sunroom that contrasts with the wood sided exterior walls of the east front entrance. The Carters desired a structure to “bring in the outdoors” more than did the familiar Colonial Revival, Classical Revival or Tudor Revival styles of their Irving Park neighborhood. Incorporation of a radiant heating system below the stone floor, a hearth near the center of the house, public spaces that flow together on a diagonal, and open spaces set off by a long narrow corridor are among the dwellings Usonian features. Almost immediately after the Carters’ September 1951 move in, the house received attention from the local and architectural press. It has been modified through continuous occupation, but retains much of its original architectural integrity.
Another house added to the National Register is the Blair House, part of the nine acre tract of Blair Farm outside of Boone. The one-and-a-half story side-gable-roofed timber frame farmhouse was built in 1844 and enlarged several times prior to 1880. It is the farmhouse and one of the few 19th century Watuaga County farms with an intact primary residence and outbuildings. Decorative wood shingles dominate the asymmetrical five-bay facade, and the full-width, enclosed front porch shelters two front doors that lead into the two rooms of the original hall-parlor plan house.
The house includes many functional features that today would be called “green.” The rear porch open area was used as a supplemental dining room. In winter months, the Blairs enclosed the dining room, west room, parlor and east room fireplaces and installed small wood heaters. They removed and stored the heaters and used the fireplaces as needed during summer months through the 1940s. Cold water flowed into a springhouse/storage room on a lower level through a small pipe in the room’s east wall and out through a west wall pipe. Always the coolest place in the house, perishable food was stored on shelves lining the wall and in a built-in screened pie safe. Complementing the house’s functional aspects are the elaborately painted ceilings and walls in six of the first floor rooms.
Marshall High School in Madison County is the only structure on the 12.5 acre Blannahassett Island. The school sits on just over two acres, and is reached only by a recently replaced bridge that leads from downtown Marshall and crosses the French Broad River. Large tracts of land for a school were unavailable in Marshall, sandwiched between the French Broad River to the south and steep hillsides to the north. The symmetrical two-story plus basement building is a fine example of an early 20th century school building in the Colonial Revival style. The U-shaped brick building has a low hip roof covered by asphalt shingles. When opened in 1926, the school was described by the local newspaper as “..protected from flood…a beautiful place visible to all…on a flat area with a baseball field, playground and tennis courts, and also a park for the community….”
The school’s auditorium served for many community functions, and as a result of consolidations of two smaller schools, Marshall High came to serve more citizens by 1951. The school was a point of pride with its Colonial Revival architecture common to banks, courthouses and other prominent community buildings. It operated until additional school consolidation in 1973. The building is currently undergoing renovation for use as artist studios.
The City Cemetery of Raleigh was established in 1798 and is the state capital’s oldest cemetery. Along three sides of the cemetery a tall handsome cast iron fence creates a visually dramatic enclosure. Family plots are marked by granite corner posts, low masonry borders, or the popular granite border or corner posts. Granite walls, cast iron gates or decorative cast iron fences were used according to wealth, and add to the visual appeal of the rectangular or square family plots. The nearly seven and a half acre cemetery of quadrilinear design is divided into two northern sections for white residents, a southwest section for “strangers,” and the southeast section for African Americans. City Cemetery is one of the oldest municipal cemeteries in North Carolina, and one of the few to provide space for African Americans. It has one of the finest collections of 19th century funerary sculpture in the state, offering head and footstones, box-tombs, obelisks and mausolea cut by Raleigh artisans and out-of-state professional stonecutters. Governors, Confederate military heroes, bankers, doctors, stonecutters, and former slaves all are interred in this ground.
The State Historic Preservation Office reviews and processes nominations to the National Register of Historic Places. For additional information, call Ann Swallow at (919) 807-6587. The Historic Preservation Office is within the Office of Archives and History in the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources, a state agency dedicated to the promotion and protection of North Carolina’s arts, history and culture and observing the 2009 theme “Treasure N.C. Culture.” Now podcasting 24/7 with information about the Department of Cultural Resources, available at www.ncculture.com.