WILLIAM WHITTED HOUSE

This rambling house late eighteenth-century house faces East Queen Street with an ornate c. 1840 Italianate-style addition facing North Churton Street. The earlier two-story structure is two bays wide and single-pile with a massive stone chimney with brick stack in the east gable end. The building has plain weatherboards with flush sheathing under the hip-roofed porch, which is supported by octagonal porch posts with a geometric railing between the posts. It has two-over-two wood-sash windows on the first floor and six- over-six windows at the second-floor level. The four-panel door retains original hardware and six-light-over- one-panel sidelights. The first floor interior retains six-panel doors, raised panel wainscot and one decorative Federal style mantel with reeded pilasters and an egg-and-dart molding.

In the late nineteenth century, a two-story, side-gabled triple-A-roofed wing was added to the left (west) elevation of the original house, perpendicular to the original house and facing North Churton Street. This section of the house is five bays wide and single-pile with weatherboards, two interior corbelled brick chimneys, and four-over-four wood-sash windows with wide segmental-arched Italianate surrounds. The decorative center-bay entrance has double-leaf arched one-light-over-one-panel doors within a round-headed decorative surround similar to those found at the Parks-Richmond House on West King Street. The entrance is sheltered by a single-bay, hip-roofed porch supported by square columns with a wood railing at the roofline and a double-leafed arched door at the second-floor level that opens to the porch roof. There are paired brackets along the roofline and two one-over-one windows with pointed-arch upper sashes in each gable. There is a two- story, hip-roofed porch at the northeast within the ell created by the two wings. The metal-roofed porch has been enclosed at the second-floor level with weatherboards and nine-over-nine windows. The first floor porch is supported by square columns.

The original owner was William Whitted. Noted Kernersville designer Jules Körner, who remodeled the Parks-Richmond House and a number of other houses in Hillsborough, may have been responsible for the Italianate-style addition. Mrs. Eliza Beaty operated a well-known boarding house here in the late nineteenth century and the addition may have been added for her. Early twentieth-century owners were James M. Hedgpeth and Edward M. Harris, and in the 1940s it became the local American Legion Post. It is now a private residence again.

08.04.2016 (G. Kueber)