There are some remarkable houses for sale in Reidsville and Rockingham County, and 312 S. Main Street in Reidsville may be the most impressive of them. A Queen Anne of high style, beautifully preserved, it would be a standout in any neighborhood.
The house was built in 1890. It sold for just $80,000 in 1995, so the current owners must have done a significant amount of work on it over the years. And they’ve done it beautifully.
The house went on the market last week, listed at $300,000. It has four bedrooms and three bathrooms, 3,626 square feet (an extremely modest $83/square foot). The lot is just under a half-acre. The interior features leaded glass, unpainted woodwork and paneling, and elegant fireplaces.
The bedrooms are spacious, and two have bathrooms en suite.
There’s a guesthouse in the backyard with a kitchen, fireplace and full bathroom.
Trees in the front yard provide a surprising amount of screening from the street. Two small brick offices are across the street, housing a doctor and an insurance agency. The immediate neighbors are First Presbyterian Church to the left, and this little bungalow to the right:
The Dr. J.V. Dick House in Gibsonville is a simple, elegant Queen Anne with a wrap-around porch and front gable. It’s big but not huge, stately but not stuffy. And it does have some history.
The latest chapter began two years ago when longtime preservationist Jerry Nix bought the house and began renovating it. It was a broken down wreck after being empty for more than 15 years. He finished earlier this year and put the house on the market in June. It’s priced at $400,000. It has four bedrooms and two and a half baths. It’s a 2,784 square-foot house ($144/square foot) on a 0.98-acre lot. The address is 515 Church Street.
The renovation kept the period features — pocket doors in the living room, arched doorways, four fireplaces, exterior shutters that still close — while updating the kitchen and bathrooms. The backyard has a large brick patio and a two-car detached garage.
The house was built in 1912 by Dr. Julius Vance Dick and his wife, Blanche Rankin Dick. Dr. Dick practiced in Gibsonville from 1907 until his death in 1941, with a couple years away while serving as an Army surgeon during World War I. He was quite the civic leader — a town alderman, director of the Bank of Gibsonville, member of the American Legion and Masons. After he died, Blanche lived in the house until the mid’50s. From 1959 to 2000, it became the Bartlett Funeral Home.
“The Bartletts did a fair amount of work to the house for its conversion to a funeral home,” The Times-News recalled earlier this year. “A portion of the porch was enclosed, and several interior walls were knocked out to make room for a chapel and visiting area.
“An 1,800-foot addition at the rear made space for services such as embalming. The new portion also included an office and a showroom for coffins.”
There’s no sign of all that any more. Long after the funeral home closed, a tree fell on the addition; the restoration included eliminating about 1,000 square feet of it. The only indication that a business of any sort was there is the expanse of asphalt where the lawn should be one side of the driveway. A new buyer might well want to get rid of that parking area, but otherwise the house is ready to become a home again.
The Moore-Gwyn-Ewalt House and its 200 acres are now listed for sale at $1.75 million.
In the early decades of the nation’s history, Caswell County was one of North Carolina’s most prosperous and prominent counties. Long beyond living memory, though, its fortunes crashed. Now, about all that’s left of its glory years are some truly impressive houses, scattered here and there from Camp Springs and Cherry Grove up to Milton and Semora.
The Moore-Gwyn-Ewalt House in the Locust Hill area is a beautiful example of Caswell’s glorious past — 6,226 square feet of Federal-style elegance on 200 unspoiled acres. The house was built in 1790; considerable square footage is in the form of two well-designed wings built in 1995. It was listed June 1 at $1.75 million. The address is 5869 U.S. Highway 158. Situated southwest of Yanceyville and close to N.C. 150, it’s within a relatively easy commute to Greensboro.
“The severe exterior appearance of the Moore House contrasts with the rich Federal motifs which appear throughout the interior,” the National Register nomination states. “The treatment of the raised basement of the Moore House as a visually integral feature of the structure by means of matching exterior architectural detail is atypical of Caswell County and is one of the major factors in the imposing appearance of the house. The Moore House is one of the best preserved and most handsome houses of the Federal era in the northern Piedmont of North Carolina.”
The house sits well back from the road. It has four bedrooms and three full and two half bathrooms. There are nine fireplaces, eight wood-burning and one with gas logs. The beautiful moldings and mantels are well displayed in the listing’s photos, several of which are below. The property includes formal boxwood gardens, a fenced garden, a pool and a pond. Near the house, a screened-in summer house stands between the two fireplaces of the original detached kitchen, which burned in 1942. An early 19th-century saddlebag cabin, originally slave quarters, serves as a guesthouse. The 1995 additions by the current owners were built with the approval of Preservation North Carolina, which holds a preservation easement on the house.
Annie
The property was listed to the National Register in 1973 through the efforts of then-owner Miss Annie Yancey Gwynn. According to the nomination, tobacco planter Samuel Moore bought the land in 1785, and the house is believed to have been built around 1790. Moore at one time owned at least 1,000 acres in the area. Although the real-estate listing notes the local lore of the house possibly having been designed by Thomas Jefferson, the National Register nomination doesn’t mention him (spoil-sport historians).
In the 1850s, the property was owned by George Swepson, son-in-law of Bartlett Yancey, one of the grand figures in Caswell’s history. (Swepson later became a Reconstruction-era bigshot and namesake of Swepsonville in Alamance County, where he built a textile mill. Sadly, he came to ruin in a railroad-bond scandal.)
Rufus Stamps bought the property from Swepson in 1858, and it remained in his family until 1942, when Annie bought it. The house hadn’t been lived in for 25 years and was being used as a barn. She restored it and got it onto the National Register. She lived there for many years; she died in 1985 at age 94, God bless her.
Annie was born in Caswell County in 1891 and attended Greensboro Female College, now Greensboro College (her last name is sometimes reported as “Gwyn”; although her middle name was Yancey, I couldn’t find any genealogical connection between her and Bartlett Yancey). She worked as a school teacher and then trained as a nurse. Annie served as an Army nurse in France during World War I and later worked as a nurse in Washington.
“On a visit to Caswell County in 1942 she bought a 179-year-old house that had been her ‘dream house’ since early childhood,” according to The Heritage of Caswell County, North Carolina, edited by Jeannine D. Whitlow. “The house was then almost in ruins. Much work was needed to restore the old Moore-Gwyn House.
“Upon retirement from nursing, Annie Yancey Gwyn came back to her native Caswell County and her ‘dream house’ and with vigor and vitality she started the task of creating a home out of the ancient ‘crone’ of a house. With some hired help she attacked the jungle of weeds and honeysuckles, mountains of junk, and started restoring the three story old brick house and the tenant houses. After many years of hard work and tender loving care she made a monument of beauty and memories from a scrap pile.”
The Moore-Gwyn-Ewalt House in the Locust Hill area is a beautiful example of Caswell’s glorious past — 6,226 square feet of Federal-style elegance on 200 unspoiled acres. The house was built in 1790; considerable square footage is in the form of two well-designed wings built in 1995. It was listed June 1 at $1.75 million. The address is 5869 U.S. Highway 158. Situated southwest of Yanceyville and close to N.C. 150, it’s within a relatively easy commute to Greensboro.
