Luther M. and Carrie McKenzie House

Luther M. and Carrie McKenzie House
Originally posted in 2015 as the Will and Mildred Chaffin House, updated May 2018

Originally, it appeared that Will and Mildred Chaffin probably built this house right across the street from Mildred’s father and cousins around 1909 when the couple purchased the property, however, it is more likely that L.M. and Carrie Leak McKenzie built this cottage around 1894.[1]

Greensboro Patriot, September 19, 1894, page2

In 1890, Luther McKenzie purchased this lot and an adjacent, now-vacant, parcel, and the following year, he married Carrie Leak. In 1894, the Greensboro Patriot reported that Mr. McKenzie was
building a "cottage" next to his store, and indeed, a store stood on the adjoining land. The McKenzies sold the store lot in 1892 and may have sold the house at that time, too, but in any case, the house lot changed hands several times before Will and Mildred Chaffin bought it in 1909. 

By 1910, it appears that John and Gillie McIver, Will Chaffin’s sister and brother-in-law, lived here. That confirms the history of the house recounted by Ruth Petree during Laura Phillips’ countywide architectural survey.[2]

The house is modest, but the McIver household included five children and Mr. McIver worked as a railroad superintendent. Like many families before World War II, the McIvers rented the house.

By the time of the 1920 census, the McIvers were no longer living in Germanton and the order in which the census-taker worked suggests that Jessie Carson, a well-known educator and public school superintendent, his wife, Irene Carson, who worked as a railroad agent, and their three young children lived in the house.[3]

The 1930 census and oral history record Mildred Chaffin living here from at least 1930 until her death in 1940.[4]

Between the time the Chaffins purchased the property and the point at which Mildred Chaffin began living here, the Chaffins lived in rural Stokes County, Whitakers, North Carolina (Edgecombe County), and Huntington, West Virginia. In the 1920 census, Mildred is enumerated in her father’s household, just across the street from this house, and William is not listed with her. When William died in 1929, he was in Halifax County working as a “farm supervisor” for the State of North Carolina. The couple’s frequent relocation and Will’s absence from the 1920 census suggest that Will Chaffin traveled frequently, but little is known of his occupational history.[5]

William and Mildred did not have children and Mildred willed the house to her niece and nephew, James “Bud” and Sarah Hill, the son and daughter of Mildred’s brother, James Morehead, and his [6]

wife, Mable McKenzie Hill. James Morehead Hill, known as Jim, was a mail carrier and built another house on Germanton’s main street, but the family lost that house during the Great Depression. Jim and Mable Hill and their children may have lived with Mildred Chaffin at some point after 1931.

After Mildred Chaffin’s death in 1940, Mable Hill, herself a widow as of 1940, continued living here and purchased the vacant lot immediately northeast of the house.[7] In 1959, Mable Hill gave that lot to her daughter, Sarah, and in 1961, Bud Hill transferred his half interest in the property to Sarah.[8] Mable Hill lived her until her death in 1986. In 1992, Sarah gave the property back to Bud, who had returned to the house in the 1980s, and he owned it until he sold it to a nephew, Danny McKenzie, and his wife, Amy, in 2001.[9] Since then, it has changed hands a few times and is now owned by Jim Ware.[10]

The house has undergone a number of changes over time so that some of its original details are lost or

obscured, but its original form and front porch detailing remain. The Mildred Chaffin House is a one-story, side-gable dwelling. The house retains its full-width front porch with chamfered posts and

quatrefoil

brackets featuring a quatrefoil design popular in Queen Anne-style or Victorian-era decoration. The central chimney that originally emerged from the roof ridge at the center of the house has been removed. The house’s original six-over-six and four-over-four sash windows have been replaced with modern sashes, and cementitious siding mimics the original weatherboards on the exterior.

The Chaffin House follows a saddlebag floor plan. In a saddlebag plan, the two rooms of the house’s primary section abut one another on either side of a central chimney. At the Chaffin House, the front door opens into a tight, triangular foyer from which doors in each angled wall connect to each of the two front rooms.

Originally, the house’s kitchen was a detached, board-and-batten structure, but over time, it was either moved closer to the dwelling or additions were made that connected the house and kitchen. The latter is the more likely scenario, with the connection being made by enclosing an open breezeway between the two buildings. In the 2000s, when cementitious siding was added to the house, the original board-and-batten siding on the kitchen section was removed or covered, making the house’s evolution less obvious.

Sarah Woodard David, 2015

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[1] Will and Mildred Hill Chaffin House, State Historic Preservation Office Survey Form, SK 302, Laura Phillips, 1983 and U.S. Census, 1900, accessed via ancestry.com.

[2] Ibid, and U.S. Census, 1910, accessed via ancestry.com.

[3] U. S. Census, 1920, accessed via ancestry.com.

[4] Will and Mildred Hill Chaffin House, State Historic Preservation Office Survey Form, SK 302, Laura Phillips, 1983 and U.S. Census, 1930, accessed via ancestry.com.

[5] Danbury Reporter, February 14, 1912, page 1; Huntington, WV, City Directory, accessed via ancestry.com; William L. Chaffin entry on findagrave.com.

[6] Will of Mildred Hill Chaffin, Stokes County Will Book 9, page 235; Stokes County Deed Book 78, page 126 and Book 91, page 18 detail the foreclosure of Jim Hill’s property; and Louise Browder, personal interview with the author, June 2014.

[7] Stokes County Deed Book 104, page 399, July 25, 1941, Ada Hill Powers to Mabel McK. Hill.

[8] Stokes County Deed Book 136, page 196, April 3, 1959, Mable McKenzie Hill to Sarah Hill Berry, and Stokes County Deed Book 192, page 576, September 2, 1961, James “Bud Hill to Sarah Hill Berry.

[9] Stokes County Deed Book 357, page 1360, March 30, 1992, Sarah Hill Nelson to Bud Hill, and Stokes County Deed Book 451, page 684, June 14, 2001, James “Bud” Hill to Danny McKenzie.

[10] Stokes County Deed Book 570, page 939, July 18, 2007, James and Sandra Turpin to James Ware.

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.

Styers House

The Styers House was built around 1887 by E. J. (Edward Justice or Edward Jesse) and Sallie Styers. The builder or carpenter is unknown. 

The lot it stands on is documented in the estate papers of Alexander Moody. He was born in 1779 in the Germanton area, and in the early 1800s, he purchased several lots and tracts on Germanton’s [1]

outer edges. His first purchase, made in 1804, the same year he married Sallie/Sarah Follis, was a one-and-a-half-acre lot on the young town’s main street.

plat from Alexander Moody's estate papers

Alexander’s death in 1826 made Sarah Moody an affluent widow, and in 1832, she married Jeremiah Gibson, also a prosperous widower. In a modern twist that speaks to their wealth, Sarah and Jeremiah signed a document that is, essentially, a prenuptial agreement keeping their estates separate.[2]

Sally Moody's lot on a plat from Alexander Moody's estate papers

Eventually, the Styers House property ended up in the hands of Jeremiah Gibson who sold it to his wife’s son-in-law, Marshall Benton.[3] At the time of Benton’s purchase, he and his wife, Anna Moody Benton, were already living in a house on the property and they also owned a store building on the property. It is likely that the house they lived in was Sarah and Alexander Moody’s old house, probably dating from the very early 1800s.

In 1876, as part of the settlement of Marshall Benton’s estate, George Hill bought the property at auction.[4] Within just a few years, however, George Hill had defaulted on a loan and William Chaffin sold the property at auction again.[5] At that time, the real estate still contained a little more than seven acres plus the Moody-Benton House and storehouse, and it was still described as the “Moody lots.” Charles Wall purchased the property at this auction, but he sold it less than two years later to E. J. Styers.[6]

Prior to this purchase, E. J. Styers lived in the Bethania Township of Forsyth County where he worked as a miller and merchant. By the time he bought the Moody land, he was a widower with three young children, but around the time he bought this land, he married Sallie Cumbie, the daughter of a successful farmer and coffin-maker in Germanton. E. J. and Sallie apparently set up housekeeping in the old Moody-Benton home and the couple became community leaders. E. J. Styers emerged as a successful merchant, railroad advocate, and newspaper editor who owned or co-owned at least two stores in Germanton and published the newspaper, the Germanton Enterprise. E. J. and Sallie both appeared frequently in newspaper reports about Germanton and in 1885, the Danbury Reporter noted that E. J.’s new store (located on the old courthouse square) was “the best and handsomest storehouse ever built in the county” with another store soon to follow. In January of 1886, the Reporter welcomed the upcoming inaugural issue of Styers’ Enterprise. E. J. Styers was also a proud Confederate veteran who frequently attended reunions with fellow veteran and neighbor, Dr. L. H. Hill.[7]

E. J. and Sallie built this house around 1887. According to local tradition, the Styers family moved the old Moody-Benton home from Main Street to the back of the lot, constructed this house, and then tore down the older home. They retained an earlier, one-room log house that probably functioned as a kitchen for the Bentons or, possibly, for the Moodys. This kitchen stood on the northeastern side of the lot, about 1/3 of the way back from Main Street.[8]

The Styers family chose Italianate references for their dwelling. The Italianate style emerged in the 1860s in North Carolina and remained popular into the 1880s. On the Styers House, the low-pitched roof is finished with heavy eave brackets and a wide frieze board. Low pediments top the windows, and sawnwork, brackets, and chamfered posts finish the full-width front porch.

Over time, the Styers family sold portions of the 7.25-acre property. The fledgling Episcopal congregation purchased a corner of it in 1887.[9] It appears that E. J. and Sallie Styers gave the land on which Germanton Baptist Church constructed its first building in 1890, but no deed records this transaction until the 1950s. R. L. Tuttle bought a lot from the family in 1910, but the Styers family later bought that property back.[10] E. J. Styers and his descendants eventually sold off other lots along Styers and Willow streets.

E. J. Styers died in the house in April, 1918. Sallie Styers also died in the house on March 24, 1921.[11] Their daughter, Sarah Long, and her husband, Edward Long, inherited the property.

Mr. Long was from Winston-Salem, where he worked for the city’s water department. Eventually, he became a Baptist minister and by 1914, the Germanton Baptist Church had hired him for two Sundays each month. Because the Styers family worshiped at the Baptist church, it is likely this is where Sarah Styers met her future husband. The couple married in 1917 in the Styers House, which was “beautifully decorated in palms, potted plants and flowers” for the occasion. The Longs lived in Winston-Salem until 1922 when they moved to Germanton. By that time, Mr. Long had become a full-time minister at Germanton Baptist Church.[12]

Two chicken houses stand behind the Styers House. These were probably constructed during the Long’s ownership. Historically, families produced eggs and chickens as a way to supplement their incomes and it is likely that Mrs. Long and her children would have been the primary overseers of this operation. 

The other outbuilding on the property is a concrete block garage. The north half of this building probably dates to the 1920s while the southern half was added at a later date, probably after World War II.

In 1966, Mr. Long donated the house to the Baptist Homes, Inc., who sold it to the Tilley family in 1968. During the Tilley’s ownership, Bill McGee moved the Moody kitchen to his property, at the north end of Styers Street. The Tilleys replaced all but one original mantelpiece with brick mantels and covered many of the rooms in wood paneling. In 1971, John and Linda Woodard purchased the house and they continue to own it today.[13]

Styers House

Styers House chicken house

 Sarah Woodard David, 2015

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[1]John R. Woodard, ed. The Heritage of Stokes County (Winston-Salem: Hunter Publishing Company, 1981), 384; Michael Fry to Alexander Moody, September(?) 6, 1804, Stokes County Deed Book 4, page 425.

[2] Agreement between Jeremiah Gibson and Sarah Moody, August 16, 1832, Stokes County Deed Book 9, page 571.

[3] Jeremiah Gibson to Marshall Benton, January 23, 1848, Stokes County Deed Book 17, pages 9 and 10.

[4] Marshall Benton (estate) to George G. Hill, January 15, 1876, Stokes County Deed Book 23, page 95.

[5] William Chaffin to Charles T. Wall, January 2, 1879, Stokes County Deed Book 24, page 219.

[6] Charles Wall to E. J. Styers, November 5, 1880, Stokes County Deed Book 26, page 375.

[7] 1880 Census; Edward J. Styers House Architectural Survey File (SK 303) and William H. Cumbie Coffin Shop Architectural Survey File (SK 283), State Historic Preservation Office, Raleigh, N.C.; and the Danbury Reporter, February 12, 1885 and January 28, 1886.

[8] Oral tradition.

[9] E. J. Styers to Trustees of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, September 5, 1887, Stokes County Deed Book 29, page 223.

[10] E. J. Styers to R. L. Tuttle, March 28, 1910, Stokes County Deed Book 54, page 232, and R. L. Tuttle to John Styers, January 1, 1917, Stokes County Deed Book 64, page 194.

[11] Styers family gravermarkers, Germanton Methodist Church cemetery, and Winston-Salem Western Sentinel, March 25, 1921.

[12] Winston-Salem Journal, January 18, 1914; Winston-Salem Twin City Daily Sentinel, November 21, 1917; Winston-Salem Union Republican, November 9, 1922.

[13] E. A. Long to Baptist Homes, Inc., December 1, 1966, Stokes County Deed Book 182, page 164; Baptist Homes, Inc., to C. L. and Annie Tilley, April 22, 1968, Stokes County Deed Book 182, page 163; C. L. and Annie Tilley to John R. Woodard, June 22, 1971, Stokes County Deed Book 199, page 618.