January | Colonial Architecture

North Carolina holds an important collection of Colonial Period architecture (roughly 1700-1800) that expresses the wealth, innovation, and ambition of its earliest European inhabitants. Largely built by enslaved craftsmen, these touchstones to our built environment include some of the most interesting buildings in American history that are protected by Preservation North Carolina through easements and covenants. 

In North Carolina, early Colonial Period architecture features post-medieval elements such as steeply pitched roofs, massive brick chimneys, and small windows. Over time, Neoclassical influences from Europe introduced elements of grandeur and symmetry to our port cities, but traditional features remained in use in our piedmont and mountains into the nineteenth century. 

North Carolina’s Colonial Style houses reveal important storylines and craftsmanship that connect us with our nation’s history. These easement-protected properties remain vital and useful landmarks in our landscape and lend our state its unique sense of place.   

The Duke-Lawrence House was built by enslaved laborers for John Duke, a planter from Virginia, around 1747. The earliest frame portion of the house features a substantial post-medieval Flemish-bond brick gable end wall and chimney that is unique in our state. A brick wing added about 20 years later sits at a right angle to the older façade and provides a high basement with a cooking fireplace. Though the fine interior paneling was removed to Richmond, VA in 1937, its rare closed-string staircase remains. Records reveal Duke likely served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution.  

John Duke’s story — a planter from Virginia moving southward for cheaper land and growing economic opportunities — was typical throughout the 18th century. Thinly populated in 1700, by 1776 NC was the fastest-growing colony in British North America, with increasing migration from Virginia and Pennsylvania swelling the colony’s western and Piedmont populations. These new Carolinians — chiefly of English, Scots-Irish, and German Protestant stock — clashed economically and culturally with the longstanding settlements of the Tidewater region, themselves descended from South Carolina and England’s planter Gentry and whose way of life revolved around the plantation and mass-enslavement. In the wake of the American Revolution, these fundamental cultural and economic differences split the state in two, with the east favoring continued allegiance to Great Britain and the west aligning itself with the Continental Congress.

The preservation of the Duke-Lawrence House is long and winding. Several stewards along the way have had a hand in preserving this fine Colonial period home, among the oldest in the state. Preservation North Carolina has held protective covenants on the property since 1998. Click here to read more about the preservation of the Duke-Lawrence House. 

The high gabled roofline and small windows of the 1775 Lane-Bennett House near Raleigh in Wake County illustrate features typical of Colonial architecture. The modest plan and garret represent the size and scale common to our state during the period. Interior features include a wide, segmental-arched fire opening, flush wall sheathing, wide floorboards, and open beam ceilings.  

Joseph Lane, brother of Joel Lane, who owned the land upon which Raleigh was founded, built this small Georgian style farmhouse in western Wake County. Lane’s service numbers identify him as one of the 30,000-36,000 men from North Carolina who fought for independence in the Revolutionary War. The majority of these men served in the state and local militias, while approximately 8,800 served in the Continental Army’s line regiments. Throughout the war, the state’s relative poverty and inability to pay sufficient recruitment bounties influenced its contributions to the continental cause. 

In 1980, the house and an outbuilding were donated to Preservation North Carolina and it was relocated to a new site to prevent demolition. It was carefully rehabilitated according to PNC’s protective covenants and rehabilitation agreement, and has been well-maintained through subsequent stewards over the years. 

Representative of early Neoclassical buildings is the Palmer-Tisdale House. The Georgian-style house reflects symmetry and balance of design brought to the colonies during the Colonial Period, but its massive brick chimneys hint at its medieval roots. The oldest part of the house is the eastern side that faces the New Bern Academy Museum. The house has a brick floored basement with two rooms at each end. Each room has a large cooking fireplace with wooden lintels. Near the east fireplace are the remains of the original bake oven.

The house was built around 1767 for Robert Palmer, but loyalist Martin Howard acquired the house in 1771. Howard, notable for being the only prominent American to publicly support the Stamp Act of 1765, fled to NC from his native Rhode Island after public opinion turned on him for his active and open support for Great Britain. Arriving in the south, he was appointed NC’s chief justice and presided over the Hillsborough trials of the Regulators arrested at the Battle of Alamance. This earned him widespread contempt among patriots, which led to the confiscation of his property and his exile to England in 1777. The house was purchased in 1776 by William Tisdale, a successful gold & silversmith, who designed the North Carolina great seal in 1778. 

In 2012, Jim and Jane Sugg placed a preservation easement on their beloved home to ensure its permanent protection with Preservation North Carolina. 

In the eastern piedmont, the Shem Kearney House is thought to have been built in 1759. Its gambrel roof and austere Georgian interior woodwork would have been elegant and tasteful in the eighteenth-century piedmont. Little is known of Kearney, but that he was born around 1734 in Nansemond, Virginia, and he was a successful planter. His wife’s identity remains a mystery.

Like all members of NC’s Planter Gentry, Kearney’s wealth, success, and influence (which extended throughout Granville, Halifax, and Warren Counties) was only possible via the continued enslavement of at least 20 human beings throughout his lifetime. Like many in the Piedmont from the mid-18th century until the Civil War, the established path to wealth and influence for any ambitious white man was built upon a foundation of cheap land and enslaved Black labor.

In 2009, with the building’s original property zoned by Franklin County for commercial use, the house was dismantled and moved to nearby Louisburg, where it is now sited with the Jones Cooke House. Both the Kearney House  and the Cooke House are protected by Preservation North Carolina.

Further west in Bethania, early German settlers built touchstones to their Germanic past. The Hauser-Reich-Butner House was built around 1770 as a two-story log house sheathed with weatherboards. Its original four-room plan remains largely intact and represents Germanic building traditions in the Carolina Piedmont. The house was likely built by Johann Georg Hauser, Sr., and his wife Anna Maria Margaretha. Among the most important events associated with the house was its use by British General Cornwallis as lodging just a few days ahead of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse.

Established in 1759 as the first planned Moravian settlement in North Carolina, Bethania was built to house refugees fleeing the ongoing French and Indian Wars along the Ohio Valley. To accommodate these refugees and the growing number of Moravian families in the area, the local leadership founded Bethania, establishing what remains to this day the only remaining independent, continuously active Moravian village in the southern United States as well as the only known existing Germanic-type linear agricultural village in the South. 

The settlement’s architecture has visibly evolved over time — with buildings exhibiting thoroughly Germanic/Central European features succeeded by homes adapted to NC’s climate and featuring architectural elements in line with Anglo-American styles. This architectural evolution mirrors the ongoing cultural assimilation of the Bethanians themselves, as well as the nationwide process which forged a cohesive American identity in the revolution’s wake.

A key landmark in Bethania’s historic district, the Hauser-Reich-Butner House has been well preserved under the careful stewardship of Mike and Michelle Leonard who placed a preservation easement on the property in 1994.