The North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources is pleased to announce that 19 individual properties and districts across the state have been added to the National Register of Historic Places. The following properties were reviewed by the North Carolina National Register Advisory Committee, and were subsequently approved by the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Officer and forwarded to the Keeper of the National Register.
“The National Register is a vital tool in the preservation of North Carolina’s historic resources. North Carolina is a leader in the nation’s historic preservation movement” said Dr. Jeffrey J. Crow, Deputy Secretary, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. “When all of the individual buildings in historic districts are counted, it is estimated that North Carolina has approximately 50,000 National Register properties.”
The listing of a property in the National Register places no obligation or restriction on a private owner using private resources to maintain or alter the property. Over the years, various federal and state incentives have been introduced to assist private preservation initiatives, including tax credits for the rehabilitation of National Register properties. As of January 1, 2009, 2,159 rehabilitation projects with total estimated expenditures of $1.223 billion have been completed.
In Central and Southeastern North Carolina
The Old Richmond Schoolhouse and Gymnasium in Tobaccoville, Forsyth County are significant for their association with rural education in Tobaccoville. The schoolhouse, built in 1914, was the first of three Old Richmond Schools at this location and served the white children living in Tobaccoville and northwestern Forsyth County until ca. 1922, when a larger consolidated school was built. The 1914 schoolhouse now serves as a tool for teaching the history of early twentieth-century education. The gymnasium, built ca. 1940 with Works Project Administration funds and local school patrons’ donations of funds, materials and labor, has been in continuous use until the present day.
In Gaston County, the McAdenville Historic District encompasses most of the historic McAdenville mill village, established around McAden Mills, a textile manufacturing complex established by Charlotte businessman Rufus Yancey McAden in 1881. Important for its industrial and architectural history, the district includes the remains of McAden Mill No. 2 completed in 1885 (Mill No. 1 built in 1881-82 is gone), McAden Mill No. 3 of 1906-07 with its unusual Classical Revival façade, fifteen 1880s brick mill houses interspersed with later frame mill houses, two large and distinctive Queen Anne style residences built for members of the McAden family, and a commercial area at the east end of Main Street, as well as an enclave of privately owned houses at the west end of Main. The social center of the village was the R. Y. McAden Memorial Hall, a Classical Revival library and assembly hall built in 1907. McAden Mills was the largest manufacturer of cotton goods in Gaston County in the early 1880s, but the company’s output was eventually eclipsed by mills elsewhere in the county. The mills closed during the Great Depression but enjoyed a renewed prosperity that revitalized the mill village after being purchased in 1939 by the Stowe and Pharr families.
As High Point’s oldest African American church building housing the city’s oldest African American congregation of any denomination, First Baptist Church stands as a landmark of High Point’s historic architecture. The church has held a commanding presence in the urban neighborhood along Washington Drive since its construction in 1907 and assists in representing the vital role the church has played in the everyday lives of its members as a place for worship and community gatherings. First Baptist Church is an outstanding local example of a transitional style of church architecture incorporating elements of both the Romanesque Revival, principally seen in the original 1907 structure, and Gothic Revival, as evidenced in the early 1950s renovation and expansion.
The Harrington-Dewar House is a rare surviving and largely intact example of a mid-nineteenth-century I-house in Harnett County. The house was originally located on River Road in the community of Cokesbury but was moved in 1977 to its current rural site closer to Holly Springs to save it from demolition. The house originated as a one-room dwelling and by 1875 had been enlarged to its current two-story, one-room-deep form with a one-story rear wing.
Built in 1915, the Bishop John C. Kilgo House stands among the first and finest residences in the Charlotte suburb of Chatham Estates, now known as Plaza-Midwood. Louis H. Asbury, one of Charlotte’s foremost architects of the early 20th century, designed the house, which exhibits an accomplished blending of the Colonial Revival and Craftsman styles. John C. Kilgo (1866-1922) had an illustrious career as an administrator of Wofford College in South Carolina, as president of Trinity College (later Duke University) in Durham from 1894 to 1910, and as a religious leader. Upon election as bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1910, he retired from his post at Trinity College. When Kilgo and his wife moved to Charlotte, the church constructed the Plaza-Midwood residence for them.
In Wilmington, explosive growth during the first two decades of the 20th century yielded several suburban developments that extended the original city grid eastward. Roughly bounded by Dock Street, Wrightsville Avenue, Castle Street, and Fifteenth Street, Westbrook-Ardmore emerged ca. 1914, conveniently situated along streetcar routes to downtown and Wrightsville Beach. The neighborhood retains its historic identity as a characteristic American suburb in its developers’ use of popular styles to create an architecturally attractive neighborhood with the added advantages of paved streets, sidewalks, landscaping, public utilities, and the proximity of public transportation. Construction in Westbrook-Ardmore was almost continuous into the mid-1950s, resulting in a wide array of architecture representative of popular 20th-century styles. Houses in the Westbrook-Ardmore Historic District range from Craftsman bungalows, particularly in the northern section that developed first, to Colonial Revival, Mission Revival, Period Cottage, Minimal Traditional, and mid-century Ranch. There also are a number of commercial buildings, while three historic churches represent the Late Gothic Revival style and the influence of Modernism.
In Raleigh, Mary Elizabeth Hospital, built in 1920 at the intersection of Wake Forest Road and Glascock Street, is significant as Raleigh’s oldest surviving privately owned general hospital that remains substantially intact. Mary Elizabeth Hospital was notable for offering modern equipment, techniques, and facilities for the provision of general medical services to the white citizens of Raleigh, including gynecology and obstetrics. The building was designed, constructed, owned, and operated privately by a group of Raleigh physicians including Harold Glascock, Ivan Procter, and Powell G. Fox.
The City of Raleigh established Mount Hope Cemetery ca. 1872 for its African American population. Located in the 1100 block of Fayetteville Street, Mount Hope is one of the first municipal African American cemeteries in North Carolina. A significant collection of approximately 1,500 19th- and early 20th-century monuments commemorate Raleigh’s black citizens, including locally significant religious leaders, teachers, doctors, businessmen, and artisans. The earliest portion of the cemetery features a picturesque garden design of driveways that divide the grounds into large curvilinear sections, each laid out into family plots. The north, west, and south expansions feature a more regular grid design.
The Paul and Ellen Welles House is a striking and well preserved Modernist Split-Level house constructed in 1956 on Birnamwood Road in the Raleigh subdivision of Highland Gardens. The design by Durham architect Kenneth McCoy Scott was greatly influenced by the Modern design theory taught at the School of Design, established at North Carolina State University in Raleigh in 1948 under dean Henry Kamphoefner. Scott belonged to the first class of graduates who disseminated the Modernist aesthetic, characterized by the integration of the building with its site, the flowing organization of space, and the interrelationship of interior space with the outdoors—all exemplified by the Welles House.
In Eastern North Carolina
Enfield Graded School, built in 1950 in Enfield, Halifax County, is notable as a largely intact example of a post-World War II urban school, built on a larger scale and offering a broader curriculum than earlier local schools. Prominent Raleigh architect Frank B. Simpson designed the impressive two-story brick building with the assistance of Eugene Savage, also of Raleigh. A pedimented frontispiece with cast stone Doric pilasters and a tall cupola mark the entrance pavilion. In addition to the classroom building which incorporates a cafeteria and auditorium, the historic school complex comprises a gymnasium, agricultural building, music/band building, and athletic fields.
In Western North Carolina
Lansing School is a large two-story, Colonial Revival style building erected 1937-1938 by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the small town of Lansing in northeastern Ashe County. The stone school building, an associated cafeteria (1947), and a high school classroom building (1952) reflect the trend for large school complexes that were built in the county after school consolidation began in 1929. Lansing School is important in the history of education in Ashe County as an example of a consolidated school and in the history of the county’s architecture as a finely crafted and well preserved representative of the native stone buildings commonly built by the WPA in western North Carolina.
On a hilltop above the town center of Crossnore in Avery County, the Crossnore Historic District includes five historic buildings and a historic bell tower constructed with stone walls or stone detailing between 1928 and 1960. As a group, the buildings and tower convey the architectural and educational importance of Crossnore School, particularly the contributions of physicians Mary Turpin Martin Sloop and Eustace Henry Sloop. Mary Turpin Martin Sloop founded Crossnore School, a private institution that cooperated with the local public school system to provide instruction in domestic, agricultural, and manual arts. The weaving program she established at Crossnore became nationally recognized and continues to the present. Her husband Eustace Henry Sloop served as chairman of the school’s board of trustees for 44 years, but his chief service to the community was the provision of medical services for thousands of area residents, as represented by the recently restored former Garrett Memorial Hospital at the south end of the district.
English-born and trained architect Richard Sharp Smith designed and built the Richard Sharp Smith House in the Chunns Cove area east of downtown Asheville for himself and his family in 1902-03. Smith had come to Asheville in 1889 as the supervising architect for the construction of Biltmore Estate. After completing that project, he established an architectural practice in Asheville and became the region’s most prominent and prolific architect of the first two decades of the twentieth century. The house is one-and-one-half stories of stacked stone masonry construction featuring decorative purlin brackets supported on carved diagonal braces and Smith’s signature pebbledash stucco in the gable ends. The Richard Sharp Smith House is an important example of Smith’s personal architectural style, which incorporated elements drawn from his work at Biltmore, the Arts and Crafts movement, and vernacular English architecture.
North of downtown Hendersonville, the Cold Spring Park Historic District is bounded by N. Main Street on the north, Maple Street, Ninth Avenue East, and Locust Street. The neighborhood was originally platted in 1910 and is significant for its concentration of well preserved Craftsman bungalows and Ranch houses dating from ca. 1910 to the 1920s and the 1940s to the early 1950s, when residential development in Hendersonville boomed.
The Hot Springs Historic District is the historic center of the small town of Hot Springs, located in the northwest corner of Madison County. Hot Springs was the northern gateway into North Carolina as a part of the old Buncombe Turnpike drover’s road along the French Broad River connecting Greeneville, Tennessee, with Greenville, South Carolina. The town also was one of the earliest resort communities in the state once the natural warm springs were discovered by permanent settlers in the early nineteenth century. The nine-acre district flanking Bridge Street conveys the town’s commercial and architectural development. The commercial and government buildings, two residences, and one church from the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries that display a wide range of architectural styles including Commercial, Queen Anne, Gothic Revival, Craftsman, and post-World War II Modern.
Located a short distance north of Tryon in Polk County, Mill Farm Inn is a two-story, side-gabled Colonial Revival-style building constructed of local blue granite that was designed by Chicago architect Russell Walcott and completed in 1939. Frances Williams had run a boarding house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and lived in France prior to coming to Tryon, where she built the inn to cater to the literary and artistically minded visitors who frequented the area.
Mill Farm Inn is a rare surviving example of expressly designed tourist accommodations in Tryon. It is also architecturally significant as a well preserved Colonial Revival-style inn.
The John Smith Miller House was built in 1906 in the Watauga County community of Meat Camp, about five miles north of Boone. The frame building is notable as an intact example of an I-house (so named for its two-story, one-room-deep form) displaying a two-tiered entry porch and restrained Victorian details such as patterned application of the weatherboard siding and sunburst ornamentation in the gables. Two-tiered entry porches once characterized the area’s I-houses, but few survive today. John Smith Miller was primarily a subsistence farmer who also raised cattle, horses, sheet, and dairy cows for income.
The Benjamin Hubbard House is one of few known examples of late eighteenth-century, log houses in the foothills separating North Carolina’s western piedmont and mountain regions. Located in eastern Wilkes County near Moravian Falls, the house consists of the original two-story, hall and parlor plan log building erected in 1778 by farmer Benjamin Hubbard and two telescoping frame additions built on the east side in the 1890s and ca. 1870, one being one-and-a-half-story bedroom wing and the second a one-story kitchen. Hubbard, who was active in the community as a road overseer, juror and member of the militia, farmed the land until his death in 1823. The high integrity of craftsmanship and quality of materials are evident today in the excellent condition of the 230-year-old house.
The Bald Creek Historic District encompasses the densely settled rural community associated with the Bald Creek School western Yancey County. Bald Creek School built in 1907 was the first public high school in Yancey County. With education rather than agriculture as a primary vocation, the Bald Creek community developed a concentration of public and private buildings that lend an urban flavor despite their rural setting, with a distinct character of small residences built close together around the school and gymnasium and neighboring church, fire department, post office, and stores. The Bald Creek Historic District is significant for its association with the improvement of public education in Yancey County and for its collection of architecture from its period of growth and development beginning around 1900 and continuing through 1958, including vernacular I-houses, Craftsman-influenced dwellings, and the Rustic Revival-style stone school and gymnasium built by the Works Progress Administration.
The National Register of Historic Places is the nation’s official list of buildings, structures, objects, sites, and districts worthy of preservation for their significance in American history, architecture, archaeology, and culture. The National Register was established by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 to ensure that as a matter of public policy, properties significant in national, state, and local history are considered in the planning of federal undertakings, and to encourage historic preservation initiatives by state and local governments and the private sector. The Act authorized the establishment of a State Historic Preservation Office in each state and territory to help administer federal historic preservation programs.
In North Carolina, the State Historic Preservation Office is an agency of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. Jeffrey J. Crow, the Department’s Deputy Secretary of Archives and History, is North Carolina’s State Historic Preservation Officer. The North Carolina National Register Advisory Committee, a board of professionals and citizens with expertise in history, architectural history, and archaeology, meets three times a year to advise Dr. Crow on the eligibility of properties for the National Register and the adequacy of nominations.
The National Register nominations for the recently listed properties may be read in their entirety by clicking on a link on the home page of the State Historic Preservation Office web site at http://www.hpo.ncdcr.gov. For more information on the National Register, including the criteria for listing, see http://www.hpo.ncdcr.gov/nrhome.htm.
The N.C. Department of Cultural Resources is the state agency dedicated to the promotion and protection of North Carolina’s arts, history and culture. Now podcasting 24/7 with information about the Department of Cultural Resources, all available at www.ncculture.com.