1217 N. Hyde Park Ave.

County property records date this bungalow to 1935, but it seems possible it was built a few years prior.  The first residents appear here in the 1929 city directory, the same year that Marion and Alzada Daniels - an African American carpenter and his wife who lived next door at 1215 N. Hyde Park - carved this lot out of their surrounding land.  They sold it to Gertrude Credle, wife of Sidney M. Credle, a development executive with Southern Lumber & Land Company.  Like many others around Durham at the time, it is likely they had this house built as an investment and rental property.

In 1938, Prince and Celia McLaurin Adams purchased this home from the Credles.  The couple had come to Durham from furher southeast - Prince Adams appears to have been born near the turn of the century in Bennettsville, South Carolina, before they wed in Laurinburg, North Carolina in 1919.  Both found work in Durham's industry, primarily in tobacco factories.  Census records indicate they had a daughter, while also sharing space with Prince's aging father, Silas Adams.  After Celia's death in 1950, Prince Adams remarried and remained in the home with his second wife, Ethel, until they passed away in the mid-1980s.