Believe it or not, these are photos that I took right after I got out of college in 1975 of a very fine and quite unusual Federal (transitioning to) Greek Revival House (circa 1830s) in Southwestern Edgecombe County, North Carolina. I guess even that far back and those many, many years ago, I was enamored with abandoned houses! This house is long gone now, probably demolished in the late 1970s. The entranceway had fine double-doors and nice Greek Revival transom and sidelights, but the overall scale and some of the exterior dentil features were decidedly Federal. It is amazing, but there were many, many houses of this scale and character in Edgecombe County back in the 1960s and 1970s. The end of the sharecropper system of farming and the use of these large houses for farm tenant houses also marked the beginning of the abandonment, rapid decay and destruction or collapse of most of these fine old Antebellum houses, most certainly built for another time and way of living. After the 1970s, there was no longer hardly any economic use for structures like this on the large farms of Eastern North Carolina, and the few that remain today are there by pure luck or through particular fortuitous circumstances. What I remember most about the old place, which may have been a Bullock or Jenkins family house (on what is now Davistown-Mercer Road), were those amazingly exotic, very vernacular mantels. Whoever the carpenter was decided to take the three-part elements of a fine Federal mantel with lozenges and sunbursts and plunked his funky interpretations thereof right into the Greek Revival era, but without some of the delicate and refined reeding and punchwork of that earlier time. Some trends in Edgecombe County seemed to live on long after they had died out in other areas. This great old place also had an earlier, rear Carolina Cottage (probably from around 1810) and a very unusual brick kitchen, especially for this area. (1970s Kodachrome Color Film Photographs by Watson Brown. I was only about 25 years old at the time!) For more of my photos, go to flickr/photos/edgecombeplanter/.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 10:00:00 +0000
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