526scaroline
526 S. Caroline Street, Rockingham, Richmond County
The H.C. Watson House
Sale pending March 31, 2026
- Sold for $475,000 on May 14, 2026 (listed at $495,000)
- 5 bedrooms, 4 full bathrooms and 2 half-bathrooms, 4,888 square feet, 1.30 acres
- Price/square foot: $97
- Built in 1883
- Listed February 27, 2026
- Last sales: $284,900, February 2024; $187,000, May 2005
- Note: The property includes the original detached cookhouse and a three-bay carriage house with living quarters.
- The current owners have extensively restored the house.
National Register nomination: “The H.C. Watson House, located at 526 Caroline Street approximately one-half mile south of downtown Rockingham, was constructed in the mid-1880s as a High Victorian residence. During a remodeling effort of the early 1900s the two frame house received numerous Classical Revival additions.
“In Rockingham during the early 1900s, fortunes were being made in the textile industry and related commercial enterprises. This newly acquired wealth was manifested in a burst of residential construction. Because of the resources available and the desire to keep a status residence. wealthy owners of older nomes continually remodeled to keep pace with. changing architectural trends, Rockingham’s elite who regarded the house as a visual symbol of prosperity were drawn to the theatrical and grandiose expression of Classical Revival style.
“The elegant two story pedimented portico with fluted Ionic columns, dentiled cornice, formal wraparound porch and attached porte-cochere demonstrate the strong influence of the Classical Revival style, as do the striking beveled and leaded glass door and window transoms and the crowning upper deck widow’s walk. The truncated hipped roof exhihibits a colorful decorative use of slate shingle work, the only example in the Rockingham vicinity. Features retained from its Victorian origins include ornamental splayed door surrounds, long narrow paired second story windows, and rounded transom and sidelights surrounding the entrance to the balcony. …
“In ca. 1895, H.C. Watson commissioned an itinerate Irish craftsman to stylishly update the entrance hall and two front parlors of the house, with exceptionally fine and unspoiled plasterwork. The cornices of the south parlor are pierced with a highly decorative leafy pattern and the cornice of the central hall features an alternating series of small plaster modillions and flowerettes.
“The ceiling medallions are formed from a repetitive use of leaves and flowers in a circular pattern, Other applied plaster motives include large ornamental bosses, elaborately scrolled console brackets supporting shallow arched niches, and elegantly curved window pediments.
“The resulting effect is richly designed and beautifully executed. The R.C. Watson House is distinguished as possessing the most notable and well preserved late nineteenth century plasterwork in the Rockingham vicinity and perhaps Richmond County.”
Henry Clay Watson (1855-1926) “was a prominent landholder, cotton gin operator and respected downtown merchant. … Among other accomplishments, he was co-founder of the Watson-King Funeral Home in 1911.” His death was front-page news in the Rockingham Post-Dispatch:
217 S. Main Street, Roxboro, Person County
The James and Laura Long house
National Register
- Sold for $687,000 on April 28, 2026 (listed at $699,000)
- 5 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, 5,006 square feet (per county), 0.71 acre
- Price/square foot: $137
- Built in 1896
- Listed March 18, 2026
- Last sale: $82,000, August 2004
- Note: Original architectural features inside the house include a grand wooden staircase, 11 fireplaces, pocket doors, appliqued ceilings and ornate moldings.
- Most of the interior is terrific, but for a house this expensive, the kitchen and bathrooms are conspicuously underwhelming.
National Register nomination: “Completed in 1896, the James A. and Laura Thompson Long House is Roxboro’s most outstanding Queen Anne dwelling and a well-preserved, intact representative of the style in a North Carolina town that prospered after the Civil War. It also exemplifies the changes in the style that took place as Beaux Arts design reemerged in American architecture after the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At the time of its completion, the Roxboro Courier described the Long House as ‘magnificent,’ ‘a modem design and strikingly beautiful,’ and ‘the most costly dwelling ever built in Person County.’ …
“J.A. Long, the ‘founder of modern Roxboro,’ built the locally significant house, and this is the only extant residence associated with him. Long, a local businessman and industrialist founded Roxboro’s first cotton mill and is credited with bringing the railroad to Roxboro. A fellow Roxboro businessman recalled that Long worked day and night, traveling, writing letters, and ‘talking much at home and abroad in an effort to get others interested’ in rail service.
“Long also owned a tobacco factory, was a founder and president of People’s Bank, served as a state senator, and held a seat on the board of the Lynchburg and Danville Railroad. Beyond Roxboro’s town limits, Long served as a trustee for the Methodist Orphanage in Raleigh, Trinity College, and Greensboro Female College.
“In addition to its association with J. A. Long, the house is the most outstanding example of Queen Anne design in Roxboro, and its grandeur and mass-produced materials represent post-Civil War mechanization and Long’s personal prosperity that resulted from New South industrialization.
“The symmetrical two-story facade with prominent round towers flanking a central entrance bay, incorporates Queen Anne elements as well as classical motifs that were reinvigorating popular architecture after the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The interior reveals lavish use of mahogany paneling and decorative mantelpieces with fanciful tiles surrounding the fireboxes.
“A grand mahogany staircase leads from the first floor hallway up three flights to the attic, which is finished with the same paneled doors with enriched Eastlake style hardware seen on the two lower levels.
“With the exception of a small 1940s addition to the rear elevation, two missing balcony railings, a missing tympanum in one gabled dormer, and early twentieth century alterations to the floor plan of the rear ell and back porch, the house remains intact and is an outstanding illustration of the enthusiasm and optimism of the age in which it was built.”
James Anderson Long (1841-1915) was born in Person County. His life was recalled as a classic rags-to-riches story. “Beginning life a poor boy giving four years of his best to a cause he loved so well, he returned from the war disconsolate and sad at the great devastation, but he was not discouraged,” The Roxboro Courier said upon his death. “Without a dollars capital he went to work and today his estate is worth probably half a million dollars, and every penny of it clean money.”
321-329 N. Washington Avenue, Reidsville, Rockingham County
- Sold for $179,000 on January 21, 2026 (listed at $179,000)
- Five houses, each with 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom, 800 square feet; 0.50 acre total
- Price/square foot: $45
- Built circa 1912 (county records say 1900; see note)
- Listed November 18, 2025
- Last sale: March 2011, part of a sale of three properties; no separate prices were broken out.
- Neighborhood: North Washington Avenue Workers Houses Historic District (NR)
Reidsville has two remarkably tiny historic districts — the Richardson Houses Historic District, with three houses; and the North Washington Avenue Workers Houses Historic District, with these five houses. The Richardson mansions and the workers houses couldn’t be more different.
The five lots have been combined into one with 329 N. Washington as the address.
District NR nomination: “The cluster of five simple frame houses located on the east side of the 300 block of North Washington Avenue is significant in the history of Reidsville as the only surviving, intact group of a type of house built in the early 20th century for black workers employed by the American Tobacco.Company shortly after construction of its tremendous new facility in Reidsville in 1912.
“As such, they are representative of a larger pattern of housing construction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as increasing numbers of industrial workers, drawn from the depressed agricultural sector to work in the cotton mills and tobacco factories, required housing in growing towns across the state. The five essentially identical houses are also closely related to traditional rural house forms, such as the early North Carolina single-pen houses of both log and frame construction. …
“The five workers’ houses … are the simplest of frame houses, consisting originally of three rooms — one-over-one with a shed room behind. The side gable roof extending over the rear shed room produces a saltbox form. The central entrance on the single-bay facade is sheltered by an attached, shed-roofed porch which spans approximately two-thirds of the facade.
“Basic materials include plain weatherboard siding and a standing seam metal roof. A brick chimney rises between the front and rear rooms, and six over six windows light each room on both stories on the north and south side elevations. Door and window surrounds are flat-board post and lintel with a beaded lintel. The foundation is brick piers with cinder block infill.
“At the rear, a ca. 1940 shed-roof addition provided a bathroom and back porch. On three of the five houses, this rear porch has been enclosed. The bathroom is clad in German siding.”
Piedmont Historic Homes 