Small House

The Small House, 1939

 

The Small House was built in 1939. It is a Cape Cod Revival cottage and is one of Germanton’s few examples of Colonial Revival architecture.

During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, architects and builders in the United States began looking to the architecture of the country’s colonial era and its first decades of existence. As they started using design elements from those early buildings, creating a style commonly called Colonial Revival, they mixed Colonial Revival with Queen Anne and other Victorian-era styles. The resulting houses were not academic copies of Colonial buildings, but rather free interpretations of components of Colonial-era houses that, together with Queen Anne features, resulted in a variety of eclectic houses. These ornate designs began giving way to Craftsman sensibilities in the 1910s and Craftsman bungalows dominated the popular house market by the 1920s. Nevertheless, some architects and designers maintained an interest in Colonial-era architecture and in the later 1920s and throughout the 1930s, architects began copying or academically interpreting the country’s Colonial designs.

Wealthy homeowners employed the Colonial Revival style for grand dwellings, but the style and its many subsets were also well-suited for small-scale houses. Most notably, architect Royal Barry Wills took the spartan Cape Cod houses of his native Massachusetts and popularized the Cape Cod Revival through a number of publications.[1]

In North Carolina, Standard Homes, a Raleigh-based company, sold building plans across the southeast and their diminutive, budget-conscious Colonial Revival cottages, which included Cape Cods and Williamsburg Revival designs, proved especially popular. It is not known if the Small House is a Standard Homes design, but the connection is likely.

Ida Hill Small was born in Germanton in 1877 to Dr. L. H. and Minerva Rierson Hill. The Hill family had been successful plantation owners and Dr. Hill served as a surgeon in the Confederate Army. Mrs. Hill died in the 1890s, but Dr. Hill enjoyed a long life of prosperity and influence as an esteemed member of the community, physician, talented fiddle player, and proud Confederate veteran.[2]

His daughter, Ida, married a young Southern Railway employee named John Chalmers Small.[3] The couple lived in Spencer, N.C., where Mr. Small worked as a train engineer, from sometime just after 1900 until about 1919 when they returned to Germanton. The 1920 census lists the Small family as a separately-headed household living in the home of Mrs. Small’s father, Dr. Hill.[4]

By 1922, however, it seems that the Smalls had relocated to Gastonia where they resided when John and his daughter, Mildred, were involved in a traffic accident. News accounts record that Mr. Small took Mildred to Atlanta for a successful surgery to repair unspecified injuries from the wreck. The following year, the North Carolina Supreme Court denied young Mildred the right to sue her father and his insurance company for $5,000 to cover damages from the wreck.[5]

John Small died in Germanton in 1929 from heart and kidney conditions, according to his death certificate. The 1930 census records Ida and her younger daughter, Mildred (Millie) living in Germanton, but it’s unclear if they lived in Dr. Hill’s house with Ida’s sister and her family of if they lived in their own dwelling. In 1939, however, Ida and her older daughter, Lillian, purchased a piece of property from Kemp and Ruby Savage. The small parcel was a triangle bounded on one side by the railroad corridor and on the other by Main Street. Here, mother and daughters constructed a one story, Cape Cod Revival house.[6]   

By May, 1940, Ida and Mildred lived at this location, immediately south of the Forsyth-Stokes County line. Ida did not work outside the home, but Mildred was a reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal. Lillian was a school teacher living in Winston-Salem as a lodger in the home of Alice Hill, her mother’s first cousin.[7]

Ida Hill Small died in 1953 and eventually, Lillian moved back to Germanton. The two sisters lived in the house for the remainder of their lives. Lillian died in 1989 followed by Millie in 1991. Lillian and Millie Small’s funerals were among the last funerals held at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church.[8]

The Small family chose a nationally popular style for their home and executed it according to professionally-drawn and probably mass-produced plans, and they built it at a time when construction in Germanton had nearly ceased. In Germanton, many families had invested in the Bank of Stokes County, making that bank’s collapse during the Great Depression especially intense for the town’s most well-to-do families, including the Hills. By the late 1930s, however, some builders were back to work and the construction industry was rebounding nationwide (only to be stymied again with the onset of World War II in a few years), but Germanton’s small population had suffered tremendous losses with the town’s primary investors left destitute. The Small family’s new house represents a surprising outlay of cash from three women and their personal recovery from the Depression, but it also demonstrates the new frugality imposed on the family after the Depression: while they were able to build a comfortable and fashionable house, they could not build a larger or showier home, which might have been expected of the family before the Depression, before Mr. Small’s death, and before Dr. Hill’s death.

Lillian Small in the green dress with her cousin, Louise Powers in purple, in front of the Small House in the 1970s

Sarah Woodard David, 2015

---

[1] Richard Guy Wilson, The Colonial Revival House (New York: H. N. Abrams, 2004), excerpt, “Houses for Good Living: Royal Barry Wills,” published online via Royal Barry Wills Associates at royalbarrywills.com.

[2] Hill and Small family tombstones in the Hill Family Cemetery, Germanton, N.C.; L.H. Hill Obituary, The Twin City Daily Sentinel, May 14, 1921, page 4; and John Woodard, ed. The Heritage of Stokes County (Winston-Salem: Hunter Publishing Company, 1981), 296.

[3] Fayetteville Observer, February 18, 1897, page 4.

[4] United States Census, 1900, 1910, and 1920.

[5] The Gastonia Gazette, January 25, 1922, page 6, and Lenoir News-Topic, June 19, 1923, page 16.

[6] Forsyth County Deed Book 454, page 26, July 31, 1939, G.K. And Ruby Savage to Mrs. Ida Hill Small and Miss Lillian Minerva Small; John Chalmers Small death certificate accessed via ancestry.com; and United States Census, 1930.

[7] United States Census, 1940.

[8] Hill Family Cemetery tombstones, and the author’s personal knowledge.