This week’s most notable new listing was built by a member of Alamance County’s Holt family in 1871. Sunny Side, 2834 Bellemont Alamance Road, was originally owned by Lawrence Shackleford Holt (1851-1937), a third-generation member of the pioneering mill owners. they were to 19th-century Alamance County what the Scotts were to 20th-century Alamance, although the Holts produced only one governor (Thomas, 1891-1893) compared to the two Governor Scotts (Kerr, 1949-1953, and his son Bob, 1969-1973).
The house is way down on the south side of the village of Alamance, an Italianate with well preserved Gothic Revival details.
It was an interesting week up along the Virginia border. A cottage built in 1825 came up for sale at $349,900 in Milton. There are now six 19th-century houses for sale in Caswell County, including three in Milton.
Also, two of the week’s most interesting new listings are in Eden. A striking 1928 brick foursquare in the Leaksville historic district was listed Monday for $550,000. Its original owner was a surgeon and a founder of Leaksville Hospital. The next day, a 1972 Mid-Century Modern came onto the market for the first time. The current owner built the house 53 years ago and has lived in it ever since.
It was an uncommonly boring week until Thursday. That’s when a listing appeared for Belmont, the most notable of the three houses in the the Robert Payne Richardson Houses Historic District in Reidsville. The Neo-Classical Belmont, 1700 Richardson Drive, is a standout in every way — architecturally significant (“an opulent example of the style, one of the finest in the state”), perched up on a hill overlooking the road, wonderfully maintained, with a range of features from a spectacular ballroom to a beach volleyball court (the mansion is now a wedding venue, after all). If you’re looking for about 9,000 square feet of truly impressive history on almost 10 acres, Belmont is up for $2.4 million, a relatively reasonable $256 per square foot. You could pay a lot more, per square foot, for a lot less (see below).
It was a quiet week, more of a back-to-school week than a let’s-sell-the-house week.
The best new listing is in High Point’s Emerywood neighborhood. If there’s a more attention-getting house for sale in High Point than 427 Woodbrook Drive, I’d love to see it. The Alex and Adele Rankin House is a grand Tudor Revival on a big lot, white with yellowish-brown half-timbers, shutters and trim. It’s for sale at $950,000; at 3,753 square feet, the price is $253/square foot, relatively reasonable for a house like this these days. Built in 1924, it has a grand vaulted Tudor living room and period color tile in the bathrooms.
Who knew the connection between Reidsville and one of Britain’s most important writers and theologians of the 20th century? This 1930 house was the boyhood home of Walter Hooper (1931-2020). “All of us who know and love the writings of C.S. Lewis owe a great debt to another figure, highly regarded in the field of Lewis scholarship but less well known to the wider world of readers: Walter Hooper. Over the course of six decades, Hooper served as literary advisor to Lewis’ estate, dedicating his life to editing, preserving, and sharing the work of C.S. Lewis.” There’s an appropriate Lewis quote painted on a kitchen wall.
124 S. Mendenhall Street in Greensboro is proving to be a surprisingly tough house to sell. It’s a striking place, built in 1915. “Its walls and oversized gambrel roof clad in shingles, this house is a rare Greensboro example of the shingle style,” the neighborhood’s National Register nomination says.
Among its other distinctive features, the house has a remarkably wide front porch that wraps around on the right with French doors opening onto the foyer and another door at the end of the porch. Interior features include unpainted pocket doors in the living room, a long window seat along a triple window in the dining room and a kitchen island with a counter that seats five. I’ve been in the house a couple times (it’s around the corner from my house), and I can tell you it’s impressive.
It was listed last September at $850,000 ($273/square foot), which was pushing the upper end of the price range in the College Hill Historic District, though not wildly. It’s a big, beautiful house (3,100 square feet). With some give in the price, one would expect it to sell fairly readily. The price did come down substantially, to $695,000, and the owners accepted an offer. The house was under contract for an unusually long time before the deal fell through (four months, from March through June).
In July, the owners took the house off the market for three weeks, changed real-estate agents and relisted it this week with a significantly lower price, $615,000. What a difference those three weeks made. You rarely see a house made over so significantly after it already has been put up for sale. Perhaps the new agent felt that the sellers’ taste for dramatic colors and wallpapers wasn’t helping (and it did hit you the minute you walked in). That’s all gone now. Here are some before-and-after photos (click on the photos to see them larger):
Two houses on the National Register were put up for sale this week. The John Randle House, circa 1800, on Lake Tillery near Norwood has 27 acres, a richly detailed history and a million-dollar price tag. The J.L. Hemphill House in Wilkesboro is an 1895 Queen Anne with just about the shortest National Register nomination you’ll ever see. Those things usually read like the writers got paid by the word.
Here are four historic homes that have been for sale for a conspicuously long time. They include a very historic 1798 National Register property in Forsyth County, an 1870 house in historic Milton, an intriguing 1898 mansion in Troy and a 1925 mansion in Greensboro’s Irving Park.
There are a variety of reasons why thy haven’t sold. Some are obvious — $600 per square foot is awfully high for any house, and Milton and Troy are a little remote from the hotter real-estate markets in the state. But the Greensboro house is a mystery. Click on the links for the complete listings.
There can be a lot of reasons why houses, historic and otherwise, sell for far less than their listed prices. Sometimes the sellers (and their agents) are just too optimistic. Sometimes inspections reveal previously unknown problems that would be costly to fix.
Here are seven historic houses that, for one reason or another, have sold recently at conspicuously lower prices than the sellers wanted. They include an 1885 house in Mount Airy, whose sale was especially painful; a 1929 bungalow in a very popular Greensboro neighborhood; a 1915 house in a Greensboro historic district; farm houses in Davidson and Davie counties; a Mid-Century Modern house in Greensboro; and a 1950s mansion in Reidsville. Some of the sellers at least deserve credit for facing reality and reducing their asking prices to get their houses sold in less than a year.
It may seem like current trends — interest rates, especially — are disadvantaging both homebuyers and sellers these days. There are some interesting trends emerging, though. April has seen an uptick in the number of historic homes for sale. It’s largely seasonal, of course, but the sheer number of homes coming onto the market seems greater than the typical spring upturn.
At the same time, competition among buyers is becoming more common. This month, 14 historic-home sales have closed at prices above asking prices, eight of them in Forsyth County. Compared to recent years, that’s a lot. (There also have been a few closings with conspicuously lower prices than listed. There’s more to say about that next time.) Here are eight of the houses that have sold significantly above their asking prices this month, plus the big winner of the year, which closed at 67 percent over its asking price in January. Click on the links for more information.
Piedmont Historic Homes 
