David Arneke

The Joseph Bason Whitsett House: A Possibly Endangered 1883 Guilford County Mansion, $1.3 Million

October 21, 2021

Update and correction, June 13, 2023: The house has been demolished. It was not a Guilford County Landmark; references to that effect have been removed.

The town of Whitsett was named for the Whitsett Institute, a school for boys founded by the son of early settler Joseph Whisett. The family homestead has stood in the small eastern Guilford County town since 1883, but it may need some luck to remain standing much longer. The house and its surrounding 11 acres are for sale at $1.3 million. A hopeful sign: The owners have listed it as a residential property, even though it has been used as a financial firm’s office for many years. A less hopeful sign: They’ve also listed it as a commercial property, “11.3 Acres of Improved Commercial Land for Sale”:

“Prime development opportunity along the I-40/I-85 corridor in the fast-growing E. Guilford and W. Alamance market,” the listing reads. “Two properties consist of an office building on 11 acres and a vacant tract of 67 acres. Highest and best use is mixed use residential consisting of apartments, townhomes and SF lots.”

And, oh, by the way, “Beautiful Victorian House built in the 1880s is currently used as office.”

212 Florence Street: A Chance to Save a ca. 1915 Craftsman Bungalow in Greensboro’s Fisher Park Historic District

October 14, 2021

Update: The house sold for $221,000 in July 2021.

212 Florence Street is a little worse for wear after more than 100 years. Still, its Craftsman features are intact, and now it has a chance for a new lease on life. The Preservation Greensboro Development Fund is seeking a buyer to restore the house to its original use as a single-family residence. It was divided into three apartments decades ago.

It’s a great opportunity for anyone who would love to restore a historic home. And as a contributing structure in the National Register Fisher Park Historic District, it’s eligible for historic-rehabilitation tax credits. The house will be sold subject to a rehabilitation agreement and a preservation easement to ensure the structure and its distinctive features are returned to good condition and converted back to a single-family residence.

The Roy and Rosamund Morgan House in Greensboro: 1940’s Home of a Distinguished Lawyer-FBI Agent-Diplomat, $863,000

October 12, 2021

Update: The listing was withdrawn June 7, 2022. It was relisted June 29, 2024.

201 County Club Drive was a relatively late addition to Greensboro’s most affluent neighborhood. The Colonial Revival was built around 1940, and today it retains the stately elegance of its era, which was rapidly drawing to a close. The house was listed for sale this week at $863,000.

The Morgan House has 4 bedrooms and 2 1/2 bathrooms, in 3,058 square feet, which comes out to an impressive $282 per square foot. The lot is 0.46 acre. The interior looks impeccable; the landscaping is gorgeous as well. The house is a fine example of Irving Park at its opulent best, but it isn’t quite as remarkable as its first owner.

Roy Morgan may have had one of the most distinguished careers of anyone in Greensboro in the mid-20th century, but he may be one of the least known among the city’s leading figures of the time. Aside from serving on the City Council, most of his work was far from Greensboro.

Old Salem’s 1875 Belo-Stockton House: It’s Being Sold for the Second Time in a Year, This Time by a Certain Retired Banker

September 30, 2021

Houses don’t come up for sale that often in Old Salem, but the Belo-Stockton House is available again for the second time in about 10 months. The previous owners put the house on the market last December and accepted an offer in three days. They were able to close the sale in less than a month, even with the intervening holidays. I guess the buyer had no trouble getting a mortgage. It was an LLC belonging to L.M. Baker Jr., the former chairman of Wachovia.

It’s almost irresistible to linger over our shared memories of Mr. Baker — for those too young to remember, he typically went by his nickname, “Bud,” which rhymes with “mud” — but let’s not let his presence distract us from this wonderful house.

Priced at $440,000 this time, the house has 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms in 2,100 square feet ($210/square foot, right about the going rate for top-of-the-line historic houses in the most desirable neighborhoods). Pictures included in the listing suggest the interior and exterior are close to impeccable.

Sold: Sunny Side, an 1871 National Register Property in Alamance County, $470,000

September 28, 2021

2834 Bellemont-Alamance Road, Alamance Village, Alamance County
Sunny Side

Sold for $470,000 on September 28, 2021 (listed at $449,900)
3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, 3,320 square feet, 1.77 acres
Price/square foot: $142
Built in 1871
Listed July 1, 2021
Last sale: $275,000, May 2016
Note: The house was built by Lawrence Shackleford Holt (1851-1937), third generation member of the local family that dominated the Alamance textile industry in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
- Nation Register nomination: “Sunny Side is a well~detailed, little-altered, two-story T-shaped frame Italianate style house with some Gothic Revival style features constructed in 1871 …. The cross-gable roof house with an elaborate bracketed cornice faces north and has a three-bay wide, single-pile main core with ornate two-bay hip-roof front porch, a projecting double-pile gable-front wing and rear ell at the east, and a small one-story single-room wing at the west. …

Greensboro City Council to consider green-lighting demolition of National Register home

September 20, 2021

Update, September 21, 2021: The house will be demolished. The City Council rubber-stamped the rezoning. For those who follow such things, council member Tammi Thurm was the only one who stepped out of line and voted against it.

The Kimrey-Haworth House was described as “endangered” when it was added to the National Register of Historic Places 30 years ago. But it’s never been as endangered as it is now. The Greensboro City Council will vote Tuesday evening on a rezoning proposal that would clear the way for the historic house to be demolished, along others on its block in the West Friendly Avenue-Muirs Chapel Road area, for a medical office building.

Medical office buildings can be built anywhere. There are some in the West Friendly-Muirs Chapel area already. But historic homes like the Kimrey-Haworth House, built around 1925, are increasingly rare. They can’t be replaced. The historic homes that would be demolished have greater value to the community than yet another office building. If the City Council says no to this developer, he can build his office building somewhere else and the community will get the same benefit from it. But if they say no to the Kimrey-Haworth House and its neighbors, those homes and their history be gone forever, and the value they bring to our community will be lost forever.

Sold: Mount Airy’s Edgar Harvey Hennis House, a 1909 National Register Home, for $560,000

August 19, 2021

1056 N. Main Street, Mount Airy, Surry County
The Edgar Harvey Hennis House

Sold for $560,000 on August 19, 2021 (originally $649,900)
5 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, 3,798 square feet, 0.78 acre
Price/square foot: $147
Built in 1909
Listed March 15, 2021
Last sale: $187,000, August 2017
Neighborhood: Lebanon Hill Historic District

Four Classic Homes for Sale in Lexington’s Most Historic Neighborhoods

August 12, 2021

Lexington’s first residential neighborhoods were built out beginning in the the late 1800s, and they’re relatively intact today. Those neighborhoods — Courtenay, Hillcrest, Oak Crest, Park Place, Robbins Heights, Rosemary Park and Westover Heights — now constitute the Lexington Residential Historic District on the National Register. It’s a sprawling area running from Business 85 and Grimes School to the north down to West 9th Street to the south. It contains the much smaller Park Place local historic district.

The district contains a variety of interesting historic homes, and four of them are on the market now. They include a gorgeous Mediterranean Revival, a judge’s austere Colonial Revival, a Craftsman bungalow and a Craftsman Foursquare, all built between 1915 and 1926.

New Listing: Northup & O’Brien’s 1933 Lasater Mill House in Clemmons, $1.99 million

August 9, 2021

The Lasater Mill House is a mansion that was originally an outbuilding for a bigger mansion. It was designed by Northup & O’Brien for a niece of R.J. Reynolds, Nancy Margaret Lybrook Lasater (1877-1952), and her husband, Robert E. Lasater (1867-1954), an RJR executive. Nancy’s mother, Mary Josephine Reynolds Lybrook (1844-1888), was a sister of RJR; she was the first of 12 children, only seven of whom survived to adulthood.

The house is at the west end of Lasater Lake, where Blanket Creek runs down to the nearby Yadkin River. The exterior and the interior are spectacular. I’d love to know what Northup and O’Brien would say about how the house has been updated. If those bathrooms wouldn’t blow their minds, nothing would.

$7.5 million and It’s Yours: The 1937 J. Spencer Love House in Irving Park

August 7, 2021

As J. Spencer Love was building Burlington Mills into the largest textile company in the world, he moved to Greensboro and built an 11,000 square-foot house befitting his status as one of 20th century America’s more prominent ground-breaking, union-busting industrialists. The mansion sits at 710 Country Club Drive on 3.3 acres of prime Irving Park property, and it went on the market this week for $7.495 million.

“The Love House is a palatial Georgian Revival mansion inspired by eighteenth century Virginia houses,” the neighborhood’s National Register nomination says. “It features Flemish bond brickwork, a steep hipped roof with segmental-arched dormers and a modillioned cornice, a five-bay facade with a swan’s neck pedimented entrance, a string course between floors, and brick corner quoins. Large one and two-story wings project from either side of the main block. An expansive landscaped lawn fronts the house and is bordered by a molded brick wall.”

Piedmont Historic Homes

Historic homes for sale in the Piedmont Triad

Author: David Arneke