New Listing – Piedmont Historic Homes

Down on Main Street, Part 1: A 1920 Aladdin House in Graham, $285,000

November 9, 2021

Three remarkable houses on three different Main Streets came up for sale last week. They’re all worth looking at. The first: The Barefoot-Tate House, 507 N. Main Street in Graham. What’s particularly wonderful about this one is that it’s a kit house manufactured by the Aladdin Company of Bay City, Michigan, and shipped to Graham to be assembled on site. (They also were referred to as “knock-down” houses; Aladdin used the term “Readi-Cut”).

“Manufactured housing” meant something different 100 years ago compared to today. Aladdin houses were affordable but substantial structures, made to last and designed for a variety of neighborhoods. Aladdin was the first mail-order home company, established in 1906. Its competitors eventually included Sears, Montgomery Ward and, briefly after World War II, the late, lamented Lustron.

The Barefoot-Tate House is the Aladdin “Colonial” model. The original price was about $1,895; the 2021 price is $285,000. It has 4 bedrooms and 2 1/2 bathrooms in 2,915 square feet, just $98 per square foot. The lot is 0.67 acre. Pictures with the listing indicate that it looks to be in great condition. It’s in Graham’s North Main Street Historic District on the National Register.

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

October 14, 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

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.

New Listing: Northrup & 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 Northrup & 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 Northrup 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.”

New Listing: A Striking 1923 International-Style Mansion in Burlington, $735,000

April 15, 2021

Update: The house sold for $650,000 on October 28, 2021

The W.T. Cheatham House is as impressive as it is rare, an International-style mansion built in 1923 in Burlington. There are relatively few International houses in the Triad, and this one in the West Davis Street-Fountain Place Historic District is brilliant inside and out.

“Its elegant design, which might best be described as ‘Classical-Mediterranean,’ renders the structure one of the most unusual houses in Burlington,” the historic district’s NRHP nomination states. “Salient features of the house are its flat roofs, stuccoed elevations, and two-story core bracketed by one-story wings with turned balustrades. Tuscan columns support the porch recessed between the wings.”

The William Lindsey House: A Grand 1870 Mansion Built by One of Reidsville’s Early Business Leaders, $434,900

April 6, 2021

“Because of both its historical associations and its architectural distinction, the William Lindsey House is a pivotal building in the Reidsville Historic District.”

— National Register nomination for the Reidsville Historic District

The Lindsey House is as impressive inside as it is from the street. And, being in one of the Triad’s smaller cities, the $434,900 price ($83 per square foot) is probably, say, a third of what it might be in Greensboro or Winston-Salem.

Interestingly, the towering columns out front weren’t an original feature. “Early in the 20th century, a new porch was constructed across this facade, in the Neo-Classical Revival style,” the NRHP nomination says. “It consists of a one-story, full-facade porch supported by corinthian columns which are repeated in monumental fashion in the central projecting two-story pedimented portico.” The original porch was apparently wide enough only to span the entrance.

New Listing: A Gorgeous 1925 Four-Square in Winston-Salem, $849,000

March 22, 2021

464 Carolina Circle, Winston-Salem
The Henry and Vera Sherrill House

$849,000
5 bedrooms, 3 1/2 bathrooms, 3,281 square feet, 0.72 acre
Price/square foot: $259
Built in 1925
Listed March 22, 2021
Last sale: $575,000, February 2002
Note: Henry H. Sherrill (1886-1973) was president of Sherrill Paving Company. He bought the property in 1922. He and his wife, Vera (1892-1976) sold the house to their daughter, Annie Louise, in 1957 but continued to live there at least into the early 1960s.
- The 1940 Census showed Henry and Vera at the address with their seven children: Frank, 27 years old; George, 25, Annie Louise, 22; Ralph, 20; Henry Jr., 18; James, 15; and Leon, 13. Two lodgers also were listed at the house.
- Son James Nelson Sherrill (1926-2012) graduated from the NCSU School of Design and became a noted architect. He lived his adult life in Hickory and outlived his sister and all five brothers.

The H.D. Poindexter Cottage: A National Register Property in Winston-Salem’s West End, $299,900

October 13, 2020

124 West End Boulevard is the smaller half of a two-house entry on the National Register of Historic Places. Winston-Salem’s H.D. Poindexter Houses date back to the 19th century and consist of two adjacent homes, the Poindexter House and the smaller Poindexter Cottage. The cottage was put up for sale last week at $299,900 and almost immediately went under contract.

The houses now stand side-by-side in the West End Historic District, but they started out a few blocks away in a neighborhood that was wiped out by the expansion of Winston-Salem business district in the mid-20th century. Their rescue was an early victory for preservation in the city. By the time the historic district was created, the Poindexter houses already had escaped into its friendly surroundings.

New Listing: The Gibson House, An Ice Cream Man’s Mid-Century Modern Mansion in High Point, $775,000

September 4, 2020

Update: The house sold for $801,000, above the asking price by $26,000, on September 25, 2020.

When Sloan and Geneva Gibson built their home in 1955, they were thinking modern all the way. The great room has bi-fold doors with motorized screens, opening the room to the outdoors. It was among the first homes in High Point with heat and air conditioning from an electric heat pump, NCModernist says.

The house merits a mention in The Architecture of High Point North Carolina for, among other things, its landscaping, designed as part of the house to provide privacy, and the concrete, tinted green so it wouldn’t stand out so much.

The Gibson House went on the market this week at $775,000. Even though it’s 65 years old, the listing describes it as “contemporary.” It started out modern, but it’s become timeless.

Piedmont Historic Homes

Historic homes for sale in the Piedmont Triad

Category: New Listing