Postbellum Buildings: Domestic

Postbellum Buildings: Domestic

The earliest extant group of postbellum houses in the historic district dates from the 1880s. Reconstruction evidently dampened housing construction in Elizabeth City, but the coming in 1881 of the Norfolk and Elizabeth City Railroad, the town's first rail link, stimulated the economy. The majority of the postbellum housing in the historic district is located along West Main Street, one of a number of spokes along which large houses were built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. West Main Street was subdivided into lots much narrower than the residential lots within the original town limits, which extended west of Dyer Street, and many of the houses are set with the narrow, gable ends facing the street. By 1914 only a few of these lots from Dyer Street west to Holly Street remained empty.³⁹

The earliest houses of this era were built in a bracketed Victorian style more closely related to the Italianate Revival style of the 1870s and 1880s than to the late Victorian Queen Anne style. Houses at 401, 209, and 108 East Fearing Street, built between ca. 1885 and 1896,⁴⁰ are good representatives of this style in the district. The plain surfaces of these two-story rectangular frame houses are articulated by a profusion of delicate sawnwork ornament, including fleur-de-lis cornices and drip courses, bracketed eaves, molded caps over windows and doors, and porches with turned railings extending the length of the flanks.

Between 1891 and 1914 the three blocks of West Main west of the original town limit of Dyer Street were filled with examples of Queen Anne and Colonial Revival style houses. These differed from the slightly earlier group in that articulation was achieved more by the shape of the house itself than by applied decoration. The picturesque rhythm of sawnwork porches, corner turrets, classical porticos, high gabled roofs and ornate chimney caps is interrupted only by the scattered older houses of simpler design and different scale than the dominant late Victorian fabric. Ail of the houses have porches, narrow front yards, and buffers of large bushes and trees. The most notable of this group are numbers 310, 312, 503, and 805 West Main Street.

The grandest example of the Queen Anne style in the district is number 312, built ca. 1902. The two-story frame house has a three-stage turretted tower, steep crossgables with splayed eaves, shingled surfaces, palladian windows, and a wrap-around porch. The narrow beaded weatherboarding is a distinctive local characteristic of the group.

Number 310, built ca. 1914, is one of the two finest examples of the Colonial Revival-NeoClassical Revival style in the district. The severe, two-story frame rectangular main block of the house is softened by rich classical trim: pilastered and pedimented window and door frames, dentil cornices, small second story window balconies, and dormer windows. The massive pedimented Ionic portico forms an interesting contrast to the Greek Revival portico of the Overman-Sheep House across the street.

A less imposing but more harmoniously proportioned example of the Colonial Revival style is the Dr. Pendleton House, 503 W. Main Street. The two-story frame house is said to be a nineteenth century structure remodelled between 1902 and 1923. A deep deck-on-hip slate roof with pedimented dormers and a one-story Corinthian porch which extends around the east side as a porte-cochere distinguish the house. The main entrance bay of the porch is pedimented, with plaster floral ornament, and the trabeated main entrance has a heavy modillion cornice and sunburst ornament.

The J. W. Dent House, 805 W. Main Street, a two-story frame Colonial Revival style house, was built ca. 1915. Its classical detail is less rich than the above mentioned houses, but the structure has a unique concave mansard roof, covered with slate.

The finest example of the Colonial Revival style, and perhaps the only house in the district which has the monumentality of the Neo-Classical Revival style, is the Charles O. Robinson House, 201 E. Main Street. The large two-story frame house was built ca. 1913 as a gift from William B. Blades of New Bern to his daughter Ivy on her marriage to Robinson, son of the founder of the Elizabeth City Cotton Mill.⁴¹ Resting on a high foundation, the house is dominated by a two-story Corinthian portico with paired fluted columns. A one-story porch with a bowed entrance bay fits beneath the portico and wraps around the east and west sides of the house. The trabeated entrance is enriched with Corinthian pilasters and a modillion cornice. Many pedimented cross- gables and dormers enliven the hip roof. The house may have been designed by Herbert W. Simpson, a New Bern architect who worked in the first quarter of the twentieth century in New Bern. Simpson, a master of the New-Classical Revival style, designed several similar houses for the Blades family in nearby New Bern.⁴² D.S. Kramer, prominent local builder, was the contractor.⁴³ (A watercolor sketch recently found bv Janet Seapker in Simpson's papers strongly resembles the Robinson house, strengthening the Simpson attribution.)

The district contains only two post-1931 houses: 305 and 308 W. Main Street. Number 305 was built ca. 1950 in the Neo-Colonial, or Georgian Revival style, Number 308 was remodeled in this style about the same time, and both are compatible with the Victorian fabric in both scale and setback.