Northern Durham

07.16.11 A large rectangular vent on the center gable adorns the well-preserved Triple-A I-house built by tobacco farmer Sam Hall at the turn of the twentieth century. With plain weatherboard siding, two-over-two sash windows, full-facade hip-roofed porches front and back, and single shouldered brick end chimneys with corbelled stacks, the dwelling...

07.16.11 (Photo by Gary Kueber) Italics below from the 1990 Durham County Architectural Inventory: One of a small group of Durham County dwellings with Greek Revival and Italianate ornament, the 1877 tri-gable frame I-house built for DeWitt Clinton Umstead, the second child and first son born to Squire D. and Martha Umstead, is among Durham County...

Named for a post office once housed within its walls, Galveston grew in several stages according to the needs of its occupants. A two-story, antebellum, side-gable I-house with restrained Greek Revival detailing was enlarged in the late nineteenth century when a one-story gable-roofed ell was constructed for the post office and joined to the main...

07.17.11 One of three nineteenth-century miller's houses surviving along the Eno River in Durham County, this well-preserved side-gable frame I-house was built on the north side of the river for Kinchen Holloway, miller of the Guess Mill. The house is typical of the substantial but plain postbellum farmhouses of Durham County with weatherboard...

Per Wyatt Dixon, this was the John Wesley Umstead house, where Governor William B. Umstead grew up, in 1980. Dixon describes in his column: Dixon doesn't give an exact location (amazing how rarely people do) and I've been surprised at how difficult it has been to ascertain where the US Senator and Governor was born and raised. Based on deed...