James Morrow Homesite, Pee Dee Ave National Historic District
This cache is a great treasure hunt for kids. You are looking for a small to medium size ammo box. Cache is well hidden and not easily visible, but should be an easy find if you know what you are looking for. You may park on Morrow St. on the grass along the road, but please don't drive all the way into the trees. This is a city owned property, but is in a neighborhood so it is recommended you come during the day. If you come at night please be inconspicuous as neighbors may be watching. Please feel free to take something or leave something if you wish. Congrats waterwolfman ftf.
This large vacant lot, shaded by old white oaks and other deciduous trees, was the location of an expansive one-story frame house built for James McKnight Morrow. Mr. Morrow (1864-1941), a prominent and wealthy Albemarle businessman, was president of Morrow Brothers and Heath, located in the downtown historic district. In 1911 he became the founding president of the Home Builders' Association and he retained that post until his death. Mr. Morrow is better known, however, as the principal donor of lands that became Morrow Mountain State Park. The house was lost in the 1950s. The remains of its brick foundation can still be seen in the grass in between a ring of large trees on the property.The first known resident in the Pee Dee Avenue district is believed to have been Daniel Freeman (1795-1877), a major land owner and real estate speculator in Albemarle, a farmer, and a storekeeper. In 1842 Mr. Freeman purchased fifteen of the town's seventy-two lots. In 1847 he purchased lot #5 on which the "Marks House" was built and he owned that lot until 1860. During those years the small one-story transitional Federal/Greek Revival house that later came to be known as the Marks House was probably occupied by his son Archibald C. Freeman (1821-1894) who was also a member of the North Carolina Senate during that period. According to local tradition Daniel Freeman erected a large two-story house about 1850 as the seat of a farm he owned on Swift Island Road; it is said to have also been the home of Archibald C. Freeman. It occupied the site of the present-day Wade F. Denning House. The Freeman House stood here until being moved, sometime between 1937 and 1941, within the block and to the north where it was renovated, expanded, and continues to stand to the present as 946 Montgomery Avenue. The lands of the Freeman farm apparently extended as far south as the slightly elevated site of the Albemarle Cemetery.Just before Archibald Freeman's death in 1894, two other prominent members of Albemarle's business and professional community erected houses on substantial holdings near the west end of Pee Dee Avenue. These houses marked the beginning of the road/avenue as an important residential location. James Milton Brown (1851-1923), an attorney, and his wife, Martha Cornelia Anderson (1866-1935), erected a large, handsome and fashionable Queen Anne-Style frame house at the west end of Pee Dee which they occupied until their deaths. Across the street, and a block to the east, Ira B. Miller (1860-1924) and his wife, M. Ida Fisher (1857-1927), also built a large two-story Queen Anne-Style frame house which they, too, occupied until their deaths. The one-story frame house that John Snotherly (1847-1926) built probably also dates to about this time.The construction of these three houses, and others which followed within a decade or so, into the early years of the twentieth century, reflected the extraordinary changes beginning to occur in Albemarle. For the first fifty years of its existence from 1842 to 1891, the county seat was little more than a small village trading center focused on the Stanly County court house and the few business houses which stood along Second and Main Streets. It had barely grown beyond the boundaries of the town laid out on the former Hearne lands in 1842. A single event in 1891 would change the character of the town forever. In 1891 the Southern Railroad extended a line, known as the Yadkin Railroad, from Salisbury southeast to Norwood, a small place on the Yadkin River just before it emptied into the Pee Dee River. The Yadkin Railroad followed a southeasterly course out of Salisbury, along the old road whose course survives today as US 52, and passed through Albemarle on its way to Norwood in the southeast corner of Stanly County.This railroad line proved to be the catalyst for the industrialization and fast growth of Albemarle. Sensing an extraordinary opportunity, textile magnate James William Cannon (1852-1921), who owned mills in nearby Concord, the seat of Cabarrus County, joined forces with a local Stanly County businessman, Irenus Polycarp Efird, to form the Efird Manufacturing Company. In 1897 the partners opened the first mill on the west side of Depot Street and the path of the Yadkin Railroad, about one block west of the old town. limit at First Street. The Efird Manufacturing Company prospered and quickly added other brick mills to its complex. New businesses downtown and both modest housing for employees and more elaborate housing for mill and town leaders began to spring up to the north and west of downtown.The steady expansion of the Efird and Wiscassett Mills, the development of the Lillian Mills in 1905 at the foot of Pee Dee Avenue, and the increase of related businesses can also be seen in the development of Pee Dee Avenue during its period of significance. Although none of the major mill owners ever lived within the district, members of its managerial staff did, together with attorneys who worked for the mills and their owners, and other businessmen whose concerns prospered with the mills. Another spur to home building in the opening years of the century was the organization of the Albemarle Building and Loan Association in 1902 and the Home Builders' Association in 1911. John Solomon Efird was president of the Albemarle Building and Loan Association. Two of its seven directors, I. B. Miller and R. A. Crowell, lived on Pee Dee Avenue, as did the company's attorney Robert Lee Smith, Sr. James McKnight Morrow (1864-1941), the founding president of the Home Builders' Association, erected a house on this lot on Pee Dee Avenue where he lived until his death, all the while remaining president of the financial institution. In a 1957 advertisement, the Albemarle Savings and Loan Association (the successor company) published a photograph of Mr. Morrow's house and noted that its first loan had been made to Mr. Morrow in 1902 to build the house. Arthur P. Harris was elected the second secretary of the company in 1915 and served as secretary as late as 1940; he too built a house on Pee Dee Avenue near the corner of 9th St. The two-story frame Crowell, Smith, and Harris Houses were all probably built within a year or two of each other at the turn of the century. The Smith House is a large fashionable Queen Anne-Style two-story house, while Mr. Harris's house is more conservative and reflects aspects of both the Queen Anne and Colonial Revival styles; both survive intact to the present. Rufus A. Crowell's house, next door to this lot, was a more conventional two-story, three-bay side-gable roof house with a one-story rear shed; it was raised to a full two stories and remodeled in the Colonial Revival Style in 1947 by D. A. Holbrook for Mr. Crowell's son. Individually and as a group, the houses built by Mr. Smith, Mr. Harris, and earlier by Mr. Brown, are the finest surviving Queen Anne-Style houses in Albemarle.The expansion of the Efird, Wiscassett, and Lillian Mills and the parallel building boom in residential and commercial construction enabled several important builders and their contracting companies to prosper in the opening decades of the century. The first of these was Locke Anderson Moody (1862-1938), a native of Albemarle. How and when he entered the building profession is yet to be confirmed; however, his earliest known building is the Victorian house he built for James Milton Brown, near 5th St. about 1891. Two years later, in 1893, he completed the new brick Stanly County Court House, and in 1907-1908 he erected the Opera Hause/Starnes Jewelers Building (NR, 1995). The last known important building he erected in Albemarle was the John Solomon Efird House on West Main Street; however, he was the likely builder of the new houses erected on Pee Dee Avenue by Messrs. Smith and Harris. Mr. Moody left Albemarle in the mid-1910s for. Washington, D.C., where he continued in the building profession. His wife Louise (1866-1896) is buried in the Albemarle Cemetery; however, he is probably buried in Washington or its suburbs. The circumstances of his departure from Albemarle are uncertain; the fact that Wiscassett Mills awarded a major construction project in Albemarle in 1913--within a year or two of his completion of the imposing Efird house--to David Augustus Holbrook, a Salisbury contractor, was probably both discouraging and influential.David Augustus Holbrook (1873-1960), Albemarle's most prominent builder from 1913 to the end of the period of significance (1947) and beyond, was born in Cabarrus County, North Carolina. In the late 1890s or early 1900s, he left Cabarrus County for Salisbury where he was employed by contractor Charles Propst and eventually became a superintendent of construction. He is said to have overseen the erection of the Grubb Building in Salisbury which remains the tallest building in the Rowan County seat. Holbrook is also said to have worked briefly with Leonidas Sloan Bradshaw (1884-1951), another prominent Salisbury contractor. According to local accounts, Holbrook came to Albemarle in 1913 to build additional mill village housing for Wiscassett Mills employees. This new "bungalow village" was immediately north of the Wiscassett hosiery mills and in the area generally bounded by North Third and North Fifth Streets on the west and east, respectively, and Cannon and Yadkin Avenues on the south and north; many of these modest bungalows survive to the present. D. A. Holbrook formed his own construction company in the 1910s in Albemarle and operated it as a wholly owned concern until 1950 when he formed a partnership, D. A Holbrook & Sons Company, with his sons, Caldwell Augustus and John Cavin Holbrook, who carried on the building company after his death in 1960.The first houses near the west end of Pee Dee, known to have been built by Mr. Holbrook date from the late 1920s and early 1930s; this group includes his own house one door down from 6th St. In 1936-1937 he erected a French Manorial-Style brick house a couple doors down from 10th St.for Dr. Victor L. Bigler. At the end of the 1930s he erected a duplex for his daughter Kate Holbrook Boyett and in 1940 he completed the construction of Christ Church near Miller St. His last known projects in the district were the Colonial Revival-Style remodeling of the Crowell House next door for Reginald Alexander Crowell in 1947, and the construction of the Edward Porcher Brunson House.At present less is known of the work of contractors Martin Harris and J. D. Harwood and Son. Mr. Harris built the Carlton House in 1936-1937 and a decade later, in 1947, he erected an imposing late Colonial Revival-Style house designed by Gerald Ehringer for William Thomas Huckabee, Jr. The firm of J. D. Harwood and Son built the Smith Cottage, the finest of the district's period cottages. Other houses in the district are surely the work of these builders and contractors; however, the associations have not been confirmed.Relatively few surviving houses are known to have been erected on Pee Dee Avenue in the 1910s; however, the 1920s ushered in a boom period in house construction on the avenue that appears to have lasted into the early 1930s. Financial prosperity was one cause for new home building on Pee Dee Avenue. Another was the deaths of James Milton Brown in 1923, Ira B. Miller in 1924, and Mrs. Miller in 1927 which resulted in the division of their largish acreages in the later 1920s/early 1930s into additional house lots at the western end of Pee Dee Avenue. That said, however, the earliest of the important houses erected on Pee Dee Avenue in the 1920s and 1930s is a group of six brick/brick veneer houses erected in the center of the district where, ca. 1926, W. Paul Ivey also remodeled John Snotherly's turn-of-the-century frame house, two doors down from here, into an attractive bungalow with low gable roofs, bracketed eaves, and banked windows. All seven of these houses were completed by 1929. Near the west end of Pee Dee Avenue, four additional houses were also completed by 1929.Four of the six brick houses built in the center of the district by 1929 are Colonial Revival or Georgian Revival-Style houses and they are the contemporaries of the handsome house Charlotte architect Louis Humbert Asbury designed for Dr. Julius Clay Hall. The Hall House, built on North Second Street, and the James U. Loftin House are arguably the most impressive Georgian Revival-Style houses in Albemarle. With a symmetrical five-bay facade, Flemish-bond elevations, a beautifully detailed entrance-bay porch, and other well-crafted woodwork, the Loftin House is a fully-realized Georgian Revival-Style house with a commanding presence on Pee Dee Avenue. Immediately next door, to the west, at the intersection of 9th St. John B. Harris, who had grown up in the house on the hill to the northeast, built an attractive one-story Colonial Revival-Style house with free classical detailing. A certain freedom and idiosyncracy prevails on two other Colonial Revival-Style houses in this immediate area; the Roy E. Brooks House has a boldly-scaled modillion-block cornice enlivening its· eaves while, across the street, the Almond-Snyder House has a curiously asymmetrical facade and brick elevations richened with granite. Crossing back to the south side of Pee Dee Avenue, at its intersection with North Tenth Street are two more mid-1920s houses; both were built by employees of Wiscasset Mills who moved from mill-owned housing to their own houses on Pee Dee Avenue. The first built, in 1925, was erected for Frank Bernard Patterson, who worked in supervisory and financial positions with Wiscassett Mills. Two doors to the east, at 1004 Pee Dee Avenue, W. Alma Smith, a supervisor, built an attractive one-story house with arch-headed porch and porte cochere openings and large banked windows. An important part of the Pee Dee Avenue Streetscape, in the bend of the avenue at the foot of North Tenth Street, it originally had a grey tile roof like the one which remains on its contemporary garage.The four contemporary houses at the near east end of Pee Dee Avenue and the district are smaller in scale, and yet they are more than "infill" in a streetscape of substantial houses. The Colonial Revival-Style brick bungalow at 1051 Pee Dee Avenue, with its handsomely detailed front block, is an antecedent of the period cottages that would be erected along the length of the avenue between 1929 and 1936. Dwight L. Crowell's one-story Colonial Revival house is large yet conventional in its detailing with the usual entrance-bay porch. The Almand-Strother House with its good Tuscan column porch, gable-front form, and bracketed eaves, applies the Colonial Revival Style to the bungalow form. The gable-front bungalow at 1126 Pee Dee is one of the few houses in the district that were probably built for rental purposes and it retains a surprisingly high degree of integrity to the present. At the west end of the avenue, the decade of the 1920s came to a close with bungalow erected at 529 Pee Dee and the extensive remodeling of Ira B. Miller's Queen Anne-Style frame house. Louis Humbert Asbury's plans for the Colonial Revival-Style refurbishment are dated 28 May 1929, and William Titus Efird probably undertook the work soon thereafter.While the construction of these eleven aforementioned new houses, the building of the Morton-Wilhelm Bungalow in 1927, and the remodeling of two earlier frame houses in the 1920s represented the continuing development of Pee Dee Avenue, the building boom which occurred between 1929 and 1939 secured for another generation its reputation as the city's premiere residential avenue. During that decade a total of twenty-one houses were erected along the length of Pee Dee Avenue; the construction of Christ Church was begun in 1939 and completed in 1940. Twenty of the twenty-one houses were either brick or brick veneer; the Sweatte-Kluttz Cottage is built of native stone and Christ Church was built of stone quarried in nearby Davidson County. These twenty-one houses represent nearly one-third of the sixty-five residential buildings which stand in the district and they form an equally proportionate part of the district's architectural character. The decade between 1929 and 1939 was the heyday of the period cottage on Pee Dee Avenue; ten of the twenty-one houses built during these years were period cottages, and many in this group were built by D. A. Holbrook. Five of the twenty houses are Colonial Revival Style. The French Manorial Style brick house (#30) of Dr. Bigler was built in 1936-1937, and a block to the east Claude B. Sweatte erected his stone cottage. The four other houses of this decade do not easily fit into convenient stylistic parameters; displaying elements of the bungalow form, the Colonial Revival, and the period cottage, however, they are clearly of the 1930s.Although there are individual period cottages erected by D. A. Holbrook and other contractors on other streets in Albemarle, no other neighborhood or streetscape has such a dense concentration of well-built and handsomely finished examples. Nor, frankly, is there as cohesive or powerful an impression as these cottages make here. Part of this impact owes to their number and the fact that many retain the original red tile roofs which compliment their brick elevations. Another aspect of their presence on Pee Dee Avenue derives from their location; four of them are located in a group of seven contiguous closely-built houses in the 400 and 500 blocks of the avenue, six of which are known to have been built by D. A. Holbrook. The others beautifully punctuate the length of Pee Dee Avenue. The Smith Cottage is the most imposing and visible of the group standing in isolation in the northeast corner of Pee Dee Avenue and North Tenth Street at the point where the avenue bends to the east. The facade, at the end of its lush boxwood-lined walk, has a series of arch-headed openings on the first story, with a rusticated stone doorway and leaded/diamond pane roof. The Crowell-Efird-Fagan House across the avenue has unusual white stucco gable-fronts as a field for brick rustication.The period cottages built by D. A. Holbrook near the west end of the district, all virtually within site of each other, reflect the variety and imagination which are so characteristic of the period cottage style and Holbrook's best work. Bands of brickwork, soldier courses, the occasional tile well~ placed on a gable, the characteristic combination of overlapping multiple gables and arches, the persistence of the facade chimney, tile-covered terraces merging with porches, and other ornamental features are combined to produce houses of great charm and originality. James Milton Brown, Jr., who grew up in the Queen Anne near 5th St. built his own cottage in the east side yard of his childhood home; it stands in the same relationship as does the Smith Cottage in the former west side yard of the Robert Lee Smith family house. Mr. Holbrook's own house one door down from 6th St. is a somewhat overgrown version of the period cottage, and its tapestry brick elevations are enlivened with decorative brickwork and other features that both brought pleasure to his eye and served as an advertisement of his skills as a contractor. The placement of three-fold garage doors on his porte-cochere a unique instance in the district, and, oddly enough, they seem to portend increasing visibility of the automobile in domestic design and like features on ranch houses of the 1950s. In 1939 he erected a duplex cottage for his daughter Kate Holbrook Boyett across Pee Dee Avenue and capped its dark brick elevations with his characteristic terra cotta tile roof.The picturesque appearance of the district's period cottages remains a counterpoint to the more ordered, mostly symmetrical elevations of the era's Colonial and Georgian Revival brick houses; however, age, materials, and a shared level of detailing make them very companionable neighbors. Robert Kiser Patterson had D. A. Holbrook built a one-story Colonial Revival-Style brick house at 441 Pee Dee Avenue between two contemporary period cottages. A few doors to the east, W. Berly Beaver erected a three-bay Colonial Revival-Style brick house between the house that Holbrook erected for Carl Helms and Holbrook's own house (. The one-and-a-half-story brick Colonial Revival-Style house at 617 Pee Dee Avenue, probably also built by Mr. Holbrook and long occupied by his son and partner, Caldwell Augustus Holbrook, stands beside the cottage of Lane Ode Parker. Some four blocks eastward, Arthur K. Winget, a president of Efird Manufacturing Company, built a more formal five-bay Georgian Revival house which he flanked with one-story porch and sunroom wings. In the next block eastward, Dr. William T. Shaver also repeated the five-bay form first seen on the Loftin House and the arch-enframed entrance seen on Mr. Winget's house.While the period cottages injected a spirited originality in the Pee Dee Avenue streetscape, three final buildings of the 1930s added yet more variety--and richness--to its appearance and fabric. In 1936-1937 D. A. Holbrook erected a French Manorial-Style brick house for Dr. Victor L. Bigler according to plans which the doctor is said to have drawn himself. In 1935 Claude B. Sweatte had erected his stone cottage between the dark red brick period cottage built for Croson B. Miller and a somewhat less elaborate cottage, with a sweeping front gable, built for Craig J. Smith. In 1939-1940 at the opposite east end of the district, D. A. Holbrook and the Wagoner family stonemasons erected a Late Gothic stone church for the congregation of Christ Church. By 1940 W. Kayser Terrill was also living in his small style one-story brick house. The hammers of carpenters and builders virtually fell silent on Pee Dee Avenue in the 1940s when compared with the pace of construction in the late 1920s and 1930s. Although the city's population grew by over 500 people between 1930 (3,493) and 1940 (4,060), Pee Dee Avenue was nearly built-up and there was relatively little construction in the district. Five buildings were added in the years up to and including 1947, the end of the period of significance, and all five reflected building styles that were well-established on the avenue. John T. Cox and Boyce G. Koontz erected red brick one-story houses that represent the end of the period cottage style in the district. The Cox House, believed to have been built in 1941-1942, has an arcaded porch with trios of arch-headed openings facing both Pee Dee Avenue west onto North Seventh Street. The Koontz House also has a gable-front entrance bay, an asymmetrical principal facade gable, the usual facade chimney, and an offset corner porch.Three important Colonial Revival-style houses appeared on Pee Dee Avenue in 1947 including the Georgian-style house Louis Humbert Asbury designed for Dr. Edward Porcher Brunson, a founder of the Stanly County hospital. Members of the Huckabee family were engaged on two important projects in 1947 that comprise the last contributing buildings in the district. William Thomas Huckabee, Jr., a second generation Albemarle lumberman, engaged Gerald Ehringer to design a Colonial Revival-Style frame house whose appearance is dominated by a full-facade two-story Mount Vernon-style portico. The appearance of this house may well have been influenced by the "Mount Vernon type home" which Malcom M. Palmer built in 1940 in the city's first residential subdivision, Forest Hills, which opened in 1939; Mr. Palmer was an investor in the Forest Hills development company. Mr. Huckabee's house was erected by contactor Martin Harris on the site of a one-story turn-of-the-century frame house occupied by the Almond family that was lost or pulled down by 1941. Whether Huckabee's house inspired his sister Alice and her husband, Reginald Alexander Crowell, to undertake renovations to Mr. Crowell's boyhood home, or their decision was independent is not now known. Whatever the case, Mr. and Mrs. Crowell hired D. A. Holbrook to remodel the house; he raised the rear block to two stories and covered the entire house with a broad side-gable roof that engaged a two-story full-facade portico.In the years from 1947 to 1955, seven additional houses were built on Pee Dee Avenue. Two of the seven were fairly conventional ranch houses; however, the other five are substantial Colonial Revival-Style houses, all built between 1947 and 1951, whose design, materials, and finish are sympathetic with the earlier historic houses along the avenue. Dr. Brunson's house, a three-bay Flemish bond house whose appearance suggests an earlier construction date, was built between two 1920s Colonial Revival-Style houses. Henry P. Efird built a similar two-story three-bay Colonial Revival-Style house beside the earlier more distinguished Georgian house of Dr. and Mrs. Shaver. Fred T. Lisk built a gable-front brick house with Tuscan column porches. George A. Hughes erected a two-story brick duplex in the northeast corner of Pee Dee and North Eighth Street; its off-center entrance is flanked by inset arcaded corner porches. The largest and most prepossessing of these houses was built for Wade F. Denning, an executive with Wiscassett Mills; the two-story L-plan brick house also boasts a two-story portico. It replaced the Freeman House on this site, the earliest known residence on the old Swift Island Road that became Pee Dee Avenue which, in turn, became and has remained the most distinguished residential avenue in Albemarle. Meanwhile, between 1937 and 1941, the Freeman House was moved to a lot on Montgomery Avenue and fitted with its own two-story portico by Lewis Kluttz Edwards whose father had bought the house in 1906, a few months after her birth. She occupied it until her death in 1966.Pee Dee Avenue was never planned as a residential community, but when prominent Albemarle citizens including James Milton Brown, Ira B. Miller, Arthur P. Harris, the Reverend U. F. Hathcock, Robert Lee Smith, Rufus A. Crowell, and James McKnight Morrow all built houses on the avenue in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, they established a precedent which became a pattern in the succeeding decades. Not only did their sons and sons-in-law--James Milton Brown, Jr., William Titus Efird, John B. Harris, Robert Lee Smith, Jr., and Reginald Alexander Crowell--chose to build and reside on Pee Dee Avenue~ but so too did other leading citizens of the county seat; Robert Kiser Patterson, W. Berley Beaver, David Augustus Holbrook, Lane Ode Parker, T. D. Almond, Arthur K. Winget, Dr William T. Shaver, Croson B. Miller, James U. Loftin, Roy E. Brooks, and Frank Bernard Patterson. These men all built substantial fashionable houses on Pee Dee Avenue that long sheltered their family life. William Thomas Huckabee, Jr., Dr. Victor L. Bigler, Wade F. Denning, and others added imposing houses in the 1930s and 1940s. This important series of houses, dating from ca. 1891 to 1947 (and beyond, but outside the period of significance) reflect a continuum of historic residential architecture that is seen nowhere else in Albemarle. By preference and natural development Pee Dee Avenue became the city's principal residential avenue and it remains so to the present.In the half century, since the end of the period of significance in 1947, Pee Dee Avenue has held its prestige as a desirable address and the neighborhood has remained stable. Relatively little construction has occurred in the district since 1947, as the inventory list indicates, and most of the important post-World War II-era buildings continued the earlier patterns of building. The increasing use of automobiles and the addition of a second or third automobile per household resulted in the addition of garages and car sheds to supplement existing facilities. Most of these have been traditional in form and materials and in no way intrude on the historic character of the district. Changing social patterns have also occasioned the construction of duplexes and apartment buildings. These buildings do not project an intrusive character into the district as much as they simply lack the distinction, quality of finish, and character of the great body of houses erected in the period of significance. Probably the most significant change in the district has been the deaths of so many of the original owners and builders of houses on Pee Dee Avenue during the past two decades. However, their demise has been accompanied by a steady interest in the avenue by a new generation of young couples and professional people who are succeeding them as proud owners of houses on the city's most distinguished residential avenue.