Northern Durham

A wooded knoll is an attractive setting for the unusually fine tri-gable I-house built ca. 1890 for Florida Hampton Umstead, the thirteenth child and tenth son of Squire D. and Martha Umstead. Umstead, reported to have been a gentleman farmer, occupied the house as his business interests elsewhere permitted. He eventually moved into Bahama and the...

Returning from service in the Confederate Army, Alvis Kinchen Umstead, the third child and second son of Squire D. and Martha Umstead, constructed a one-story, gable-roofed, dogtrot log house ca. 1866 for his bride, Emeline Harris. The structure is built over a fieldstone foundation and bracketed by fieldstone and brick end chimneys. The...

[Originally] adjoining the Mount Bethel Church in Bahama, a variant of the nationally popular Foursquare style with a projecting gabled bay was constructed for Norman Tilley in 1918. The dwelling has a number of Craftsman details such as a full-facade hip-roofed front porch with square porch posts, and four-over-one windows. When the church...

From tobacco farm to architectural tree farm.

When Phillip Southerland, overseer at Stagville, retired ca. 1887, his employer, Bennehan Cameron, sold him five hundred acres at the northernmost edge of his vast lands. There Southerland constructed a two-story frame house with Greek Revival ornament that is similar in plan to the house at Stagville where he lived until 1886. Southerland modified...

In the late nineteenth century, Luther Roberts constructed a single-pen gable-roofed kitchen house of four-by-four circular-sawn timbers joined by square notches and set over hewn-log sills salvaged from an earlier structure. In keeping with its intended use, the kitchen has a large fireplace with a simple post and lintel mantel and a prominent...

Andrew Jackson Roberts, donor of the land for the Mount Bethel Church in Bahama, was the first known owner of the one-pen, side-gable, hewn-log dwelling with a large fieldstone end chimney that stands on a hill overlooking Lake Michie. Built on a stone foundation, its rugged walls are joined with V-notches and chinked with mud plaster. A batten...

In 1892, a group of African-American worshipers organized a Sunday school in a log cabin beside the Norfolk and Western Railroad tracks one mile south of Bahama. The structure also served as an elementary school for black children. By 1915, the congregation had acquired land and constructed a small building at the site of the present church. As...

Important as a rare survivor of a kind of dwelling once found throughout what is now Durham County, this one-pen log farmhouse with fieldstone and brick end chimneys was built in the early nineteenth century by Jesse Mangum. Mangum and his wife, Polly Parrish, raised twelve children in the house; three sons later served in the Confederate Army...

When Captain Addison Mangum, a cousin of United States Senator Willie P. Mangum, took over operations of the Flat River Post Office, he moved it in 1858 to this one-story two-room structure on his farm. There the post office and Mangum’s law office shared quarters with one room reportedly allocated to each purpose. The small frame building is...