Friday, 2/03/2012
The Chestnut Hill Historic District is a relatively compact late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century residential neighborhood adjacent to downtown Asheville, North Carolina. The area reflects the remarkably cosmopolitan character the mountain town quickly acquired once rail transportation opened it to tourists and investors in the 1880s. Practically all of the more than 200 buildings in the Chestnut Hill Historic District were originally single-family dwellings. Architecturally they range from the local in-town vernacular of the period to sophisticated versions of the nationally popular Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, and Shingle styles. At least two locally-important architects' works are represented: J.A. Tennent and R.S. Smith. Tennent designed Asheville's important late-nineteenth century municipal buildings. Smith, who came to Asheville with the firm of Richard Morris Hunt to work at Biltmore House and stayed on, first, as Vanderbilt's staff architect and, later, in private practice, contributed at least eight stylistically hybrid original designs to the district and influenced many more. [Asheville City, Buncombe County, NC]

Thursday, 2/02/2012
The Montford Area Historic District is a large, primarily upper middle-class residential neighborhood developed during Asheville's 1889-1920s boom era. Lining the curving, shaded streets of the neighborhood is a wide variety of dwellings including examples of the Queen Anne style with its towers, brackets, and lively textures; the picturesque, intentionally informal Shingle style; several interpretations of the Colonial Revival style with rich classical detail and frequent use of expansive gambrel roofs; and the widely popular, unpretentious, comfortable Bungalows, some with handsome California-inspired detail. A special, highly individualized collection of dwellings which gives the neighborhood much of its distinctive character was designed or inspired by Richard Sharp Smith, Asheville architect who also worked at Biltmore House and Village. Smith's work in the District makes frequent use of dramatic, sculptural forms derived from the Colonial Revival; including gambrel rooflines, pebbledash or stuccoed wall surfaces, and simple Colonial Revival details. [Asheville City, Buncombe County, NC]

Wednesday, 2/01/2012
The South Broad-East Fifth Streets Historic District is located near the southern edge of the original limits of the town of Company Shops, a complex of repair facilities established in 1855 by the North Carolina Railroad Company in central Alamance County. The limits of the town, incorporated in 1866, were a one-and-one-half-mile square centered on the hotel of the North Carolina Railroad. All of this land remained under the ownership of the railroad until 1869, when the company began to gradually sell lots to private individuals to build dwellings and shops. One such individual was railroad employee and local entrepreneur Gabriel M. Lea, who in 1871 built a residence (no longer extant) on a two and one-half acre site that is now along East Davis Street between Spring Street and Lexington Avenue. [Burlington City, Alamace County, NC]

Tuesday, 1/31/2012
The East Davis Street Historic District is located within the original limits of the town of Company Shops, a complex of repair facilities established in 1855 by the North Carolina Railroad Company in central Alamance County. The limits of the town, incorporated in 1866, were a one-and-one-half mile square centered on the hotel of the North Carolina Railroad. All of this land remained under the ownership of the railroad until 1869, when the company began to gradually sell lots to private individuals to build dwellings and shops. One such individual was railroad employee and local entrepreneur Gabriel M. Lea, who in 1871 built a residence on a two and one-half acre site that is now along East Davis Street between Spring Street and Lexington Avenue. Like nearly all pre-1886 architecture in Burlington, the Lea House has been demolished.

Monday, 1/30/2012
The North Main Street Historic District is an extremely well-preserved residential district containing 64 principal historic buildings, primarily houses, built from the mid-19th century to 1949. It is the most intact late nineteenth and early twentieth century residential neighborhood in Graham. Established in 1851 as the county seat of Alamance County, the town evolved during the second half of the century as a small trading and government center surrounded by rural estates owned by such industrialist and professional families as the Holts and the Kernodles. Graham, lacking railroad access, experienced a smaller amount of mill development than Burlington in the late 19th century. [Graham City, Alamace County, NC]

Sunday, 1/29/2012
The Alamance Mill Village Historic District is associated with the development of the textile industry in Alamance County and with the dramatic shift in North Carolina's social history as many people left their farms in the 19th century to work in textile mills and live in mill villages owned by the mills. The District embodies the distinctive characteristics of the residential section of a mill village with three different types of mill houses representing three different periods of construction. Two other houses in the District representing distinctive features from the second and third quarters of the 19th century. The mill dam is an impressive and well-preserved example of 19th-century engineering. [Alamance Village, Alamace County, NC]

Saturday, 1/28/2012
Bellemont Mill Village Historic District is comprised of the three-story brick mill building and the twenty-three associated one and two-story frame mill houses, one of the most intact examples of a late nineteenth century textile mill village in Alamance County. With its textile-manufacturing industrial base, Alamance County was in the forefront of industrialization of the North Carolina Piedmont in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bellemont Mill Village was built in 1879-1880 by brothers L. Banks Holt and Lawrence S. Holt, major figures in North Carolina's post-Reconstruction textile-based industrial revolution. [Bellemont, Alamace County, NC]

Friday, 1/27/2012
The West Davis Street-Fountain Place Historic District is an intact, residential neighborhood representing the urban growth and development which occurred in Burlington between 1890 and 1930, transforming it from a sleepy, pre-industrial community dependent on the railroad, to a prosperous city whose economy, though based on the textile industry, was beginning to undergo diversification, Originating as farmland owned by several of the families who sold land to the North Carolina Railroad Company for Company Shops, the area began to evolve as a residential neighborhood in the 1880s as the community's business and civic leaders sought home sites outside of the city center and away from the textile mills.

Thursday, 1/26/2012
Lakeside Mills Historic District — one of the five cotton mills established in Burlington by the descendants of cousins Peter and Edwin M. Holt between 1883 and 1892. Organized in 1892 by brothers Walter L., Edwin C., and Samuel M. Holt, it was instrumental in averting a financial crisis in the wake of the demise of the North Carolina Railroad repair and maintenance shops and contributed to Burlington's rise as a textile industry center of national importance. Of all of Burlington's late 19th century textile mills, Lakeside Mills is the least altered, its factory complex virtually intact.

Wednesday, 1/25/2012
The Glencoe Mill Village Historic District is located on the east bank of the Haw River about three miles north of Burlington in Alamance County. It is a typical but remarkably well-preserved example of 19th century industrial villages that once flourished in North Carolina's Piedmont region. The District covers a little more than 100 acres and consists of a manufacturing and commercial complex, a power and water system and a residential and social unit.

Tuesday, 1/24/2012
Ohio Counties — How 88 Counties in Ohio Got Their Names.

Monday, 1/23/2012
The Pee Dee Avenue Historic District, comprising sixty-five residential buildings, Albemarle Cemetery, and Christ Episcopal Church, survives to the present as Albemarle's principal residential avenue and the location of the city's largest, most intact neighborhood of historic residences. This group of mostly brick, frame houses, and one stone house spans the entire continuum of historic residential architecture in the Stanly County seat. Lining both sides of Pee Dee Avenue for nearly its entire length, the District's cohesive streetscape includes late-nineteenth century and turn-of-the-century two-story Queen Anne style houses, Bungalows, a large and imposing collection of Colonial Revival and Georgian Revival style houses, and an important group of interwar-era period cottages. Twelve of these buildings, including his own impressive bungalow cottage, are known to have been built by Albemarle's principal interwar period builder, David Augustus Holbrook (1879-1960), and probably twice that number (or more) were actually built by him and his company in the 1920s and 1930s. Other contractor builders represented in the Pee Dee Avenue Historic District are Locke A. Moody, Martin Harris, J.D. Harwood and Son, and the prominent Stanly County stonemasons, Wagoner and Sons. [Albemarle City, Stanly County, NC]

Sunday, 1/22/2012
The Waxhaw-Weddington Roads Historic District is a unique cluster of distinctive late 19th and early 20th century suburban residences grouped around a Y-shaped intersection of two state highways located in a semi-rural setting some two miles from the county seat's central core. By the end of World War I, the grouping, sometimes referred to as "West Monroe," was already recognized locally as a distinctive entity. The houses are associated with several Monroe citizens who were prominent in the commercial, industrial, political and judicial life of the city and county in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in particular, the many contributions of W.C. Heath and R.B. Redwine. [Monroe City, Union County, NC]

Friday, 1/20/2012
Northside Historic District — the early history of the District was greatly influenced by the fact that the area was separated from the original 1793 section of Elizabeth City by Poindexter Creek, one of four streams flowing into the Pasquotank River through the present city. Following a stream bed that is now covered, Poindexter Creek provided a natural boundary between the developing city and the farmland that originally comprised the Northside District to the north. These farms were served by what was known in 1845 as "the main road running from Elizabeth City to Norfolk [, Virginia]." Now known as North Road Street, it followed a route that extended from Norfolk to Nixonton, the only eighteenth century town in Pasquotank County and the seat of local government between 1785 and 1799. This road remains the city's main thoroughfare north from downtown. [Elizabeth City, Pasquotank County, NC]

Thursday, 1/19/2012
The Shepard Street-South Road Street Historic District has been an important neighborhood in Elizabeth City since the early 1850s. In 1851 the area bounded generally by what is now Ehringhaus Street and Brooks, Roanoke, and Southern avenues was taken into the municipal limits, which previously had extended southward only to Ehringhaus Street. Prior to that year, the area was largely farmland with only scattered and isolated development. Only one dwelling remains in the Shepard Street-South Road Street Historic District predating its inclusion into the city, the ca.1849 home of boat captain Josiah Simmons (701 Herrington Road). [Elizabeth City, Pasquotank County, NC]

Wednesday, 1/18/2012
The Riverside Historic District is a neighborhood that developed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period in which the city expanded not only in population but also in commercial and industrial importance. It's history begins in 1857 with the construction of the Messenger-Fearing-Morrisette House (911 Riverside Avenue), an impressive plantation house built in the Greek Revival style but substantially altered ca.1958. From 1857 until the 1890s the district was agrarian in nature, containing both the Fearing farm and the farm of the Underwood family at its eastern edge. The District's development primarily reflects the platting of subdivisions along the Pasquotank River in 1893, 1902, and 1926. During the ensuing decades a Riverside address was one that was desired both by the children of the men who had shaped the city's fortunes during the late nineteenth century and the self-made industrialists and businessmen who came to Elizabeth City seeking opportunity during the early 20th century. Riverside Avenue became, and has remained, a fashionable residential avenue in Elizabeth City inhabited by people active in all aspects of the city's affairs.

Tuesday, 1/17/2012
The West Chapel Hill Historic District comprises an intact upper-middle class residential neighborhood that developed in North Carolina between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. Its development was spurred by its inclusion within the incorporated town limits in 1851, and was perpetuated by a high interest in real estate activities by town citizens, university professors and universitry employees. Adjacent to the university, the area emerged as the town's major western neighborhood in the 1870s. The neighborhood is typical of residential development that occurred across the country in the first decades of the twentieth century in response to trends set forth by the "City Beautiful Movement" and the "Neighborhood Movement." [Town of Chapel Hill, Orange County, NC]

Monday, 1/16/2012
The Gimghoul Neighborhood Historic District (also known as Gimghoul Piney Prospect Development), containing thirty-seven houses built primarily from 1924 to the late 1930s, is a faculty subdivision that was the intrapreneurial project of the secret Order of the Gimghouls, a fraternal society of undergraduates, faculty and alumni of the University of North Carolina. The Gimghouls platted the development on a portion of their land adjoining the university and sold lots in order to finance the construction of their stone Gothic Revival castle [in the adjacent Chapel Hill Historic District, National Register 1971], completed in 1927 in the woods adjacent to the subdivision. Gimghouls member and prominent real estate developer George Stephens of Charlotte supervised the project, and the area was platted by Gimghouls member T. Felix Hickerson, an engineering professor and well-known road designer.

The Foxhall Village Historic District is significant as a cohesive collection of residential properties designed and developed to evoke the image of a traditional English village. [Washington, D.C.]

Sunday, 1/15/2012
Chapel Hill Historic District — In 1789 a committe was chosen to select an appropriate site near the center of North Carolina for a state university. New Hope Chapel Hill, named after nearby Anglican New Hope Chapel, was chosen partly as a result of the efforts of Hillsborough's James Hogg, who favored that location and urged friends in the Orange County area to make generous offers of land and money. The trustees laid out the campus carefully, developing a comprehensive plan that included the campus, broad expanses for park, and the town area. The central plan involved two wide strips of land at right angles to each other, to be used as park areas, one going east toward Point Prospect and the other establishing the primary axis for the campus. It was a time when the builders of the new country sought to lay out plans on an ambitious scale appropriate to the great democracy of their ideals.

Saturday, 1/14/2012
The Davidson Historic District illustrates the development of Davidson as a small college town and Piedmont railroad community between the antebellum period and mid-20th century. It is significant for its association with Davidson College. The college was founded by the Presbyterian Church and includes an impressive collection of important architectural resources. The District's well-preserved commercial core oriented to both the railroad and the Davidson College campus contains a wide range of businesses that served surrounding landowners, businessmen, and mill workers, as well as college students and faculty. Dry goods stores, banks, drugstores (with soda fountains), jewelry and tailor shops, and hotels all occupied existing commercial buildings on Main Street. [Town of Davidson, Mecklenburg County, NC]

The Town of Forest City (Rutherford County, NC) began in 1877 as a crossroads community named Burnt Chimney. The post office was renamed in 1882 in honor of Forest Davis, a local lumber merchant.

Wednesday, 1/11/2012
The Pharrsdale Historic District (also known as Eastover) is one of several suburban developments that surrounded the city of Charlotte, North Carolina in the early 20th century. It was originally laid out in 1926 on land inherited by Miss Sarah Pharr, and the first house was built in 1927. The neighborhood experienced 3 distinct phases of development. The first began in 1927 and was interrupted in 1930 by the Great Depression. After the passage of the Federal Housing Act of 1934, although the Depression was far from over, the construction industry had regained some strength and development in Pharrsdale resumed. [City of Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, NC]

Monday, 1/09/2012
The Wesley Heights Historic District is one of a string of early suburbs circling Charlotte, it has its own character and identity stemming largely from the times and circumstances of its inception. It is unique because it is the only such suburb dating primarily from the boom years of the 1920s. The other neighborhoods in Charlotte were already in place by that time, and relied, out of necessity, on the proximity of public transportation. Wesley Heights, on the other hand, was developed after commuting by automobile had pervaded everyday life.

Sunday, 1/08/2012
The Elizabeth Historic District is Charlotte's second streetcar suburb. The neighborhood is actually a combination of all or parts of five residential subdivisions laid out between 1891 and 1915, but in which construction were simultaneous and continuous between 1900 and 1941, creating a virtually seamless homogeneity. The Elizabeth Historic District is also the location of the city's first public park, Independence Park, whose original design was an early commission of John Nolen, one of the most important landscape architects and city planners of the early 20th century, whose 1911 design for nearby Myers Park became a model for many up-scale residential suburbs in the south.

Saturday, 1/07/2012
The Dilworth Historic District, was the work of Edward Dilworth Latta, entrepreneur, industrialist, developer, and New South advocate. Dilworth brought the first electric trolley system to Charlotte and planned his original suburb around it. The platting of the grid plan featured a grand boulevard, three sections of which were built and survive, at the edges of the neighborhood, as well as a park with pool, lakes, pavilion, theatre, and ball fields located at the east end of the suburb. The idea behind Dilworth's development was to provide convenient, readily accessible housing for the growing population of the city.

Friday, 1/06/2012
Covington, Kentucky and Ogden, Utah share the geographical feature of being built at the confluence of 2 rivers. Covington (Kenton County) on the Licking and Ohio rivers; Ogden (Weber County) on the Weber and Ogden rivers.

Tuesday, 1/03/2012
The North Charlotte Historic District includes a collection of middle-income dwellings that were all erected on land owned by the North Charlotte Realty Company in the early 20th century. Located at the southeast side of the district, these dwellings are relatively intact, well-crafted examples of nationally popular styles. The houses were located too far from downtown Charlotte to attract commuters, and so were occupied by a variety of skilled craftsmen and the shopkeepers and clerks who worked in the district's commercial area.