Bitting-Pepper-Blackburn-Petree House

Bitting-Pepper-Blackburn-Petree House

ca. 1810; ca. 1855

This one-story, frame house immediately south of the Germanton Methodist Church was built in two stages. The two rooms at the back of the house, sheltered by a steep gabled roof, comprise the earliest part of the dwelling. These rooms likely date from the early 1800s and may have been built by Anthony Bitting or his daughter and son-in-law. The front block, with a side-gabled roof sheltering a room on either side of a central hallway, probably dates from the 1850s, during the Pepper family’s ownership.

views of the older rear wing

In 1798, Anthony Bitting purchased five acres just beyond what was then the southern edge of Germanton. In 1801, his nineteen-year-old daughter, Martha, married Joshua Banner, and eventually, Joshua Banner became the owner of this property, which was part of Bitting’s five-acre purchase. A deed recording the transfer from Anthony Bitting to Joshua Banner or Martha Bitting Banner has not been uncovered, but the land was in Joshua’s estate in 1848, and Anthony Bitting had already given one-half-acre of that five acres to his daughter before her marriage. It is likely that Martha Bitting Banner inherited this property from her father when he died in 1804.[1]

It is unclear what Joshua and Martha Banner did with this property. Both the Banners and Bittings were wealthy farmers and local merchants. During the 1820s, based on legal notices placed in newspapers of the day, Joshua served as the county jailor and after his death in 1846, his property was auctioned. Among his sizeable real estate holdings were a five-acre tract in Germanton that included two town lots, a house, and a cemetery (probably either the cemetery now associated with the Methodist church or the cemetery now known as the Riddle-Golding-Bitting Cemetery), and another town lot with a house. One of these two town tracts incorporates this property.[2]

ad for Banner estate sale

It was during this era of Bitting-Banner ownership that the back two rooms of this house were constructed. These rooms could have been an office or store for Anthony Bitting, but this was not his house because his will describes where he was living at the time of his death and his previous dwelling location, neither of which are this property. This could have been a small house for Joshua and Martha Banner or a portion of their house, possibly constructed around the time of their 1801 marriage, or it could have been an office or store for Joshua Banner or a rental house. In any case, architectural evidence suggests it was constructed in the early 1800s.

In 1848, John Pepper purchased this property. Pepper was a local physician who had lived at the southern end of town in the present-day vicinity of Germanton Baptist Church, near his Moody in-laws, until he moved a mile or two north in 1832.  Before Dr. Pepper’s purchase was final, he transferred his winning bid to his son, Dewitt Pepper, but that sale and transfer were not finalized until 1853.[3]

In 1852, Clarendon Martin Pepper, Dewitt Pepper’s brother, become ordained as a Methodist minister. A few years later, the Germanton Methodist congregation completed their new brick sanctuary in 1857. Although C.M. Pepper was away at college in 1850 and was living in Danbury in 1860, he may have served the Germanton congregation before 1860. By 1870, Reverend Pepper was living in Germanton and his place in the census suggests he was living in this house.[4]

 

relationship between the house and church

It is most likely that the front portion of this house was constructed during the Pepper family’s ownership, around the same time the Methodists built their sanctuary. That guess is based on house's Greek Revival style references and the local tradition that describes this house as the Methodist parsonage.[5] Although the 1860 census enumerates C. M. Pepper in Danbury, it is likely that he or his family (Dewitt Pepper is buried in the church’s cemetery) had the front rooms constructed for the minister’s use. Additionally, the front rooms of the dwelling are similar, though more modest in scale and ornamentation, to several houses built by John Dedrick Tavis, a German builder who lived and in Salem.

Eventually, the house ended up in the hands of C. M. Pepper. A transfer to C. M. Pepper has not been found and Laura Phillips noted in her architectural survey of the county in the early 1980s that a letter from C. M. Pepper indicated he had purchased the property from his brother, Dewitt, but never recorded the deed.[6] In 1873, C. M. Pepper sold the property to William and Emma Blackburn.[7] Mr. Blackburn was a tobacconist and based on the 1880 census, it appears that he probably was not living at this location, so he may have rented the house out, or he may have been enumerated out of order in the census. The Blackburns owned it until 1919 when they sold it to H. H. Riddle.[8] Riddle likely did not reside here and the house changed hands again before Riley Petree purchased it in 1925. Ruth Petree, Riley Petree’s daughter, eventually became the owner and held the property until the late 1990s. Currently, the Methodist Church owns the house.[9]

Although modest and unassuming, this house encapsulates a cross section of Germanton’s architectural record. The back part of this house is probably the second oldest structure in Germanton and it is certainly the least-altered example of early architecture in Germanton while the front section is probably one of several examples of J. D. Tavis’ work in and around the town.  

Sarah Woodard David, 2015 

To learn more about John Dietrich Tavis, click here. 

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[1] State of North Carolina. An Index to Marriage Bonds Filed in the North Carolina State Archives. Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Division or Archives and History, 1977; and description of sale of Joshua Banner’s land, Stokes County Deed Book 18, page 184, April 11, 1853.

[2] “Sale of Valuable Land,” The Greensboro Patriot, September 9, 1848, page 3; and several advertisements in 1825 and 1826 in The North-Carolina Star (Raleigh, N.C.), including November 10, 1826, page 4.

[3] Stokes County Deed Book 18, page 184 documents the sale of this lot from Joshua Banner’s estate in 1848 to John Pepper who transferred the property to his son, Dewitt Pepper, April 11, 1853.

[4] John R. Woodard, ed. The Heritage of Stokes County. (Winston-Salem, NC: Hunter Publishing Company, 1981), 408.

[5] An undated (probably ca. 1940) newspaper article in the Stokes County Federal Writers Program file at the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh, NC, repeats this association between the church and this dwelling.

[6] Laura Phillips. Pepper-Blackburn-Petree House architectural survey file, SK 298, 1988, NC State Historic Preservation Office.

[7] C.M. Pepper to William and Emma Blackburn, August 8, 1873, Stokes County Deed Book 21, page 599.

[8] William and Emma Blackburn to H. H. Riddle, June 25, 1919, Stokes County Deed Book 67, page 164.

[9] H. H. Riddle to S.M. James, December 31, 1921, Stokes County Deed Book 68, page 466; S.M. James to R.J. Petree, August 20, 1925, Stokes County Deed Book 73, page 496; Ruth Petree purchase at auction, July 10, 1929, Stokes County Deed Book 80, page 302.