Lauriston Hardin Hill House

Lauriston Hardin Hill House, ca. 1900

Lauriston Hill built this house around 1900.

Lauriston Hardin Hill was born in 1837 to Joel and Mildred Golding Hill, wealthy planters near Germanton. After studying medicine in Philadelphia, Dr. Hill came home to practice in Germanton, and the 1860 census documents him living with his widowed mother and working as a physician. In 1862, he married Minerva Rierson, and by the summer of 1863, he was at Gettysburg serving as a surgeon to the 53^rd North Carolina Regiment. As the Confederates retreated, Dr. Hill stayed behind to treat the wounded, but Union forces captured him. He was allowed him to continue caring for injured in the aftermath, but he remained a prisoner for an unknown period of time before he was returned to his regiment.[1]

Following the war, Dr. Hill resumed his life in Germanton and around 1870, he bought this property from the estate of Leonidas Gibson.[2] The deed notes that a house stood on the property at the time of Dr. Hill’s purchase, and based on information from Germanton resident and long-time school teacher, Ruth Petree, this earlier house had been in the Pepper family. Indeed, the lot Dr. Hill bought from Gibson’s estate comprised three lots that Beverly Jones had amassed before the Civil War, and John Pepper had owned one of those lots.[3]

Jesse Powers train wreck, near Mt. Airy, 1897
photo from Bud Hill, copied by Wade Duncan in 1988

In 1894, Minerva Hill died, and Dr. Hill’s daughter and her husband, Jesse Powers, an engineer for Atlantic and Yadkin Railroad, moved in with Dr. Hill and two of Dr. Hill’s other adult children. Jesse and Ada’s first child, Lauriston, was born in 1897, and that same year, Jesse was nearly killed in a train wreck that took the life of another Germanton resident, Walter Chaffin.[4]

The next year, in December, 1898, a spark or ember from a passing train started a grass fire that spread across the Hills’ property, consuming a barn, the house, and another barn on an adjoining lot. News accounts suggest that the family lost all their belongings, and Dr. Hill’s granddaughter, Louise Powers, recounted that she was born in 1900 in the StyersHouse, directly across the street, because her family was living there while Dr. Hill had the existing house built.[5]

The Hills completed their new house around 1900, and Dr. Hill’s children and grandchildren continued living in the house. As a descendent from a prominent white family, Dr. Hill enjoyed a privileged life in Germanton. In addition to working as a physician throughout the Germanton area, Dr. Hill was a lauded Confederate veteran who regularly attended veterans’ reunions with his neighbor, E. J. Styers. He was also an accomplished fiddle player and regularly played with string bands in Stokes and Forsyth counties. His talent was in particular demand at Confederate veterans’ gatherings and fiddlers’ conventions throughout the South, with one commentator noting that the only thing wrong with his playing was that it was dangerously close to violin music.[6]

Dr. Hill, in Germanton, possibly with his sister-in-law and nieces or daughters
photo from Bud Hill and copied by Wade Duncan in 1988

Dr. Hill also bought and sold a considerable amount of real estate, and he frequently served as an estate executor, notably for deceased African Americans with the Hill family name, many of whom can be traced to his father’s plantation. Numerous Germanton African American residents carried the Hill family name, including brothers John and Patrick Hill, who owned property on Main Street and appear to have been enslaved by the Hill family prior to the Civil War. Other enslaved persons and, later, free African Americans, carried and repeated two first names that appear to be direct references to Dr. Hill: Laurie and Doctor.[7]

By 1920, the house brimmed with Dr. Hill, his unmarried daughter, his widowed daughter, and two of his married daughters and their husbands and children. Dr. Hill died in 1921, and by 1930, only Ada Hill Powers and her husband, Jesse, and children, Lauriston and Louise, resided in the house. They all continued living here until their deaths: Jesse in 1931, Ada in 1953, Lauriston in 1973, and Louise in 1986.[8]

The house remained relatively unchanged until it was sold out of the family 1988. The Hill House is a two-story house with a symmetrical, three-bay-wide façade. A two-story ell extends from the rear façade. The house is covered in weatherboard siding and until a few years ago, retained original two-over-two sash windows. The front entrance comprises a transom over a double-leaf door with square, colored lights framing glazed panels trimmed with applied sawnwork. A hip-roof porch extends across the façade and wraps around the southwest elevation. Interior chimneys flank the center hall which features beaded board wainscoting. The southwest room of the main block opens into the two rooms of the rear ell. A two-story porch follows the back of the main block and ell and acts as an exterior hallway so that the ell’s rooms both upstairs and downstairs can be accessed without having to pass through another room.  

Behind the house, a small one-story gabled outbuilding remains. This may have been a canning house or wash house; it appears to be too small to have been the family’s original kitchen. Farther behind the house, across the former railroad corridor, is the Hill family cemetery.

Sarah Woodard David, 2015

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[1] Jerry Rutledge in John R. Woodard, ed. The Heritage of Stokes County (Winston-Salem: Hunter Publishing Company, 1981), 295-296.

[2] James Rierson, Clerk of Superior Court, to L. H. Hill, February 2, 1876, Stokes County Deed Book 23, page 111. This deed finalizes the sale of the property from L. R. Gibson’s estate to L. H. Hill at some point in 1869 or 1870; Isaac Gibson, L. R. Gibson’s father and executor, reported the sale to the court in 1870.

[3] Ruth Petree interviewed by Laura Phillips, Dr. Lauriston Hardin Hill House survey file, SK301, N.C. State Historic Preservation, Raleigh, N.C.; Beverly Jones to L. R. Gibson, March 7, 1852, Stokes County Deed Book 18, page 100; John Pepper to Beverly Jones, April 13, 1842, Stokes County Deed Book 14, page 62.

[4] Hill family gravemarkers, and The Union Republican (Winston-Salem), April 15, 1897, page 3.

[5] Mary Louise Powers, numerous conversations with the author, and Greensboro Telegram, February 16, 1898, page 4. Other news reports stated that the barn on the adjoining lot belonged to Dr. Hill’s mother, but she had died in 1869; at the time of the fire, Dr. Hill’s nieces lived next door and the reference may be to their barn.

[6] Bob Carlin. String Bands in the North Carolina Piedmont (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2004), 116.

[7] Various census records, and Joel Hill estate papers and will, NC State Archives, Raleigh, NC.

[8] Mary Louise Powers, numerous conversations with the author; and Hill Family Cemetery gravemarkers.