Eastern Durham

The owner of this one-story gable-front frame building believes that it was a school for African- American children in the 1920s. The building is very similar in appearance to the Russell School, and is likely one of the eighteen Rosenwald schools constructed in Durham County before 1930. The exterior is very well preserved, with plain weatherboard...

Late Victorian and Craftsman-style features are featured here on the popular one-story, one- room-deep house form. When James and Ida Rhew built their three-bay, tri-gable house in the early twentieth century, they embellished it with simple Victorian decoration. Clipped corners at either end of the house are ornamented by a single oval window, and...

The Nichols-Belvin-Stokes House, a single-pen log farmhouse located on a knoll not far from Ellerbe Creek, dates to the early years of the nineteenth century. Characteristic of an early homestead are the large fieldstone and brick exterior end chimney, the steeply pitched gable roof, and the rear batten door. The interior contains a single room...

An unusual house type for Durham County, the frame one-and-a-half-story coastal cottage thought to have been built ca. 1812 by John Nichols, has been in his family-by-marriage for almost 185 years. When Nichols was killed in an accident, the house became the property of his widow, Mary, who married Granderson Philpott. Title subsequently passed to...

Once among the most stylish residences in northeast Durham County, this mid-nineteenth- century frame I-house with a low hip roof was demolished several years ago. In an area of relatively modest houses, this one was notable for its paired Italianate two-over-two windows and its paneled double-leaf entry door with sidelights and transom; all were...

The Harry Morgan Family Complex, a rectangular, hip-roofed, one-story box-and-canopy store and a Craftsman-style house, typify the house and business ensembles constructed to serve automobile travelers on newly improved roads in Durham County during the 1920s and 30s. The canopy projecting from the main facade of the store is characteristic of an...

The early-nineteenth-century, three-bay, frame dwelling built over a high fieldstone foundation is one of a very few hall-parlor houses that have survived in Durham County. The entry door of six raised panels, held in place by H and HL hinges, opens into an ample hall with wide- board flooring, horizontal wainscoting, and plaster, all refinements...

02.07.09 Owned by Samuel and Marjorie Stanley. 07.16.11

A one-pen log house built during the first half of the nineteenth century was enlarged in the early twentieth century by a frame room of the same approximate size, each having a separate entrance and exterior end chimney. A massive rubble-stone chimney serves the nineteenth- century pen, and a smaller fieldstone and brick chimney, inscribed, “built...

A group of Baptists living in western Wake County formed a new congregation in 1875 and requested the services of student ministers at Wake Forest College. Rufus Ford became the first pastor of the new Olive Branch Baptist Church and the congregation met for worship in the Dayton Academy building (now demolished). After Ford graduated in 1878, other student pastors served until in 1924 professional clergy replaced them. The following year, the present church building, a unique structure in Durham County, was completed.