From Preservation North Carolina, here’s the King House, an “early and important” property that’s been on their list for a while. It’s a great opportunity to give a historic structure a total restoration. Here’s how PNC describes it:
“Early log house with large stone chimneys, exposed beaded ceiling joists, wide wall planks, hand-forged door hardware, and a rear wing, once an early separate kitchen. All situated on a scenic ridge between Wentworth and Reidsville.
North Carolina’s brilliant mid-century Modernist houses are frequently endangered and often torn down, largely because buyers, sellers and realtors often do not realize the importance of how to identify, preserve and protect these livable works of art. You can’t save something if you don’t know where it is and why it is important.
This tour supports NCModernist, an award-winning nonprofit digital archive for owners, students, journalists, researchers, real estate agents, historians, preservationists, architects and architecture fans to protect and preserve the state’s Modernist houses. With documentation on over 5,000 houses, NCModernist is an unrivalled resource for Modernist research and preservation.
Update: The house sold for $805,000 on December 13, 2023.
One sure way for your name live on is to have a high school named for you. Today, there may not be many people who could tell you who George Grimsley was (or even what his first name was), but most everyone in the area knows his name is on Greensboro’s oldest high school. Few people associated with the city have had a greater impact on Greensboro and North Carolina than he did as an innovative school superintendent, promoter of public libraries and an early president of Jefferson-Standard Life Insurance.
Grimsley’s suitably impressive house is now on the market for $1.295 million. One of the most prominent homes in the Fisher Park Historic District, it has 4 bedrooms and 2 1/2 bathrooms. It’s a spacious 3,568 square feet, sitting on just over a half-acre. The price works out to $363 per square foot, which is in the range of what the most high-end historic homes are going for in elite neighborhoods.
Update: The house sold for $365,000 on March 1, 2023.
If you’re looking for a historic home in a small Triad town, the Wade-Arscott House may be the best buy available today. The classic Queen Anne is just $369,000, a bargain at $106/square foot. That is, of course, if the house is as sound and well-functioning as it looks. And if you’re seeking, or at least can live with, the relative remoteness of Troy.
But if that all checks out, 214 N. Main Street is a lively, rambling piece of 19th century history. It’s a B&B today (well reviewed), but a fairly small one (3,474 square feet), manageable for a family home. The house has four bedrooms and four bathrooms. The lot is a quarter-acre. It’s one of just five structures in the National Register’s tiny Troy Residential Historic District.
Architecturally, there’s a lot going on here. “A notable example of Queen Anne architecture in Troy is the two-and-a-half-story Wade-Arscott House, a rambling frame residence that is enlivened by widely spaced windows, a one-story wraparound porch supported by square posts and enclosed by plain balustrades, a cylindrical, weatherboarded and shingled tower capped by a helmet roof at the southwest corner of the structure, and a peaked gable dormer incorporating a recessed balcony,” the district’s nomination states.
Update: By March 1, three of these houses were under contract.
The best place in the Triad to find an affordable starter or smaller home these days may be in the area’s smaller towns (actually, this may always be true). Here are five move-in ready bungalows and cottages priced under $200,000 and two more priced just a bit more.
The houses are spread out from Mount Airy to Ramseur. All but one were listed since January 1. They were built between 1900 and 1948. One is a stone cottage, one has remarkable brickwork. One is now an Airbnb short-term rental, none are restoration projects. Several have pretty substantial lots, up to just under an acre.
Update: The home was sold for $350,000 on February 28, 2023.
The number of historic homes for sale has contracted sharply in recent months, along with the rest of the market, but one still robust category is National Register properties in Guilford County. There are three for sale, and 204 E. Railroad Avenue in Gibsonville is by far the most affordable. At $425,000, the price comes out to a modest $120 per square foot.
“The Francis Marion Smith House, erected in 1898, is the most stylish and impressive residence in Gibsonville surviving from the 1890-1910 period that witnessed the town’s major growth,” its National Register nomination says. “The two-and-a-half-story frame house combines elements of the Colonial Revival and Queen Anne styles, including an elaborate program of classical trim and turned ornament.”
Not surprisingly, given its location and date, it’s associated with the Whitsett Institute and family, arguably the most prominent family of its day in eastern Guilford County. “It is one of three notable late nineteenth and early twentieth residences associated with the Whitsett Institute, a boarding secondary school and junior college in the Whitsett community near Gibsonville. The three houses (one of which has already been listed in the National Register) are among the finest houses combining Colonial Revival and Queen Anne style elements in eastern Guilford County.”
Update: The house sold for $334,000 on March 30, 2023.
The Wray-Rainey-Webster House was the home of two major 19th-century leaders in Reidsville. Now for sale at $350,000, it’s a significant and well preserved piece of history in Reidsville’s Old Post Road Historic District and National Register historic district. The address is 716 S. Main Street.
“Believed to be one of the oldest houses surviving in the district, this two-story frame residence has changed hands more than most of the pivotal houses, and its original location was some one hundred yards to the south on the present site of the Hugh Reid Scott [House],” the district’s Nation Register nomination says. The Honorable Mr. Scott owned the house for a time, as did John Webster, congressman and crusading editor of Webster’s Dollar Weekly.
Some historic neighborhoods and rural communities are fortunate enough to still have buildings that once housed corner grocery stores or other retail businesses. The buildings come up for sale occasionally, and there are now four historic properties for sale in the Triad that feature former stores as homes or outbuildings. For the most part, there are relatively few available details about the structures themselves and the businesses they housed. But there are at least a few facts known about all but one.
2401 Urban Street in Winston-Salem was built to be a neighborhood grocery store with an apartment upstairs. 400 W. Main Street in Reidsville may not have been designed with a residence in mind, but it has provided a location for a business and a home for its owner as far back as 1959. The Robert G. Mitchell Store in Wentworth was built in 1900 and is barely standing, an unsound building with no heat or electricity. At 3405 Maple Avenue in Burlington, the tiny old store behind the house is a mystery.
Update: All 13 houses were sold on April 28, 2023, for a total of $2.21 million. The buyer is a landlord that owns 30 other properties in Greensboro.
Greensboro landlord James Dutton owned 13 rental houses when he died last month. All have been put up for sale at once with a total asking price of almost $5 million. Nine are in the College Hill Historic District. All were built between about 1896 and 1926, and all were originally single-family houses, split into apartments decades ago. Except for two houses on North Cedar Street, they’re close to UNCG.
Among them are relatively simple Queen Annes, Queen Anne-Colonial Revivals and Foursquares. One suffered a fire in 1992, leaving only the exterior intact; the interior had to be entirely rebuilt (that was before James Dutton bought it). Some were previously owned by Dutton’s parents, Herman Clarence Dutton and Agnes B. Dutton, going back as far as 1939. Two were bought in 2021.
The houses are listed for sale separately. Any could be returned to single-family residences, and many could be very impressive. Most of the prices are relatively high for restoration projects, but they’re also high for rental properties in their respective neighborhoods, particularly considering Dutton’s evident, decades-long disinterest in maintenance and investment. Only two of the houses have central air conditioning, according to county property tax records (and at least one already had it when Dutton bought it). Eleven of the 13 are painted white. Some are listed with more apartments than bathrooms, according to county records; some bathroom additions may not have been reported for property-tax purposes.
Update: The listing was withdrawn without a sale in March 2023.
The Holt family is one of the most prominent in the history of Alamance County and of North Carolina as well. Charles T. Holt was a third-generation member of the textile family, and the mansion he built is quite the monument to the Holts’ stature.
“The Charles T. Holt House, the most ornate nineteenth century mansion in Alamance County, is located in the town of Haw River overlooking the Granite Mills complex, on twenty-five acres of lawn, grazing pasture, and farm land,” the property’s National Register nomination states.
Piedmont Historic Homes 