Shropshire-Wagoner House

Shropshire-Wagoner House, 1946

The Shropshire-Wagoner House represents the continued application of Colonial Revival designs in the post-World War II period when the style, which started in the late 1800s, had become more stripped-down in response to the desire and need for traditional houses that could be built quickly and relatively cheaply during the post-war building frenzy. It also represents a subtle but distinctive sub-type of Colonial Revival popular in the southeast, particularly in Virginia and North Carolina. Furthermore, the house also demonstrates the preference for tearing down Victorian-era houses during the post-war years.

By the beginning of World War II, Germanton had already achieved its peak population and peak economic prosperity and was poised to begin a decline. Freight service on the railroad had ceased, and within just a few years of the war’s end, most of the town’s African American residents had moved elsewhere in search of work. Germanton’s merchants continued to do business, but increasing car ownership made Winston-Salem’s shops, businesses, and jobs more accessible.

In May of 1946, Robert and Viola Shropshire purchased two lots on Germanton’s main street.[1] One was known as the “jail lot” and the other as the “home lot.” Today, the “jail lot” is a vacant lot immediately north of the Shropshire-Wagoner House while the house stands on the “home lot.” The jail lot was so-named because it had been the location of one of Germanton’s jails. (Other jail sites were located on the opposite side of the street.) It is not clear when a jail stood on this property, but it would have been before the town lost the county seat in 1849. By the time of the Shropshire purchase, the jail appears to have been long gone.

The house lot, on the other hand, seems to have had a house standing on it when the Shropshires purchased it. That house was likely a Poindexter family house built by a group of siblings who were the children of William and Anna Eliza Nelson Poindexter. By 1860, Anna Eliza Nelson Poindexter had died and William was living with several of their children outside Germanton. Ten years later, William, too, was dead, and the couple’s eldest son, David, headed a household that included his three children, his siblings, and a niece. The family lived near but outside Germanton, presumably in William and Anna’s house.[2]

In 1888, William N. Poindexter, another of William and Anna’s children, purchased a three-quarter-acre lot on Main Street in Germanton.[3] This is the land on which the Shropshire-Wagoner House stands today. The next year, in 1889, W.N. sold the lot to his brother and sisters, David, Caroline Carrie, Lena (Selena), and Lizzie. In 1900, the siblings and their cousin, Fannie Davis, appear in the census living on Germanton’s main street. This suggests they moved into Germanton sometime between 1889 and 1900. It is unclear if a house was on the property prior to the Poindexter ownership and if so, it is not known if the Poindexters tore it down and built a new house or if they lived in an older house.

Current neighbor, Louise Browder, recalls a house at this location that shared some similarities with the Mollie and Alice Hill House, which suggests that the Poindexter House was a Victorian-era dwelling. If the Poindexter House did date from circa 1890, any similarity to the Mollie and Alice Hill House was probably not coincidental, as that house was built around 1880 either for or by Susan Hill, who was also child of William and Anna Poindexter.

Carrie Caroline Poindexter died in 1917 and the house passed through heirs and eventually, was sold to William and Marjorie McIver in 1944. In 1946, the McIvers sold the house to the Shropshires. According to current owners, a sink in the house came from a prison and the Shropshires incorporated some materials from the Poindexter house into the new dwelling. Additionally, the kitchen cabinets bear a Sears and Roebuck label dated 1946. Sears was famous for their kit houses, but they stopped production in 1940, so this is not a "Sears house," but obviously, the cabinets came from Sears. 

Viola and Robert Shropshire lived here from 1946 until Robert’s death in 1953. Robert enlisted in the Army in 1917 and retired in 1946. Their connection to Germanton or reason for relocating here after Lt. Col. Shropshire’s retirement is not known, but it appears they constructed the existing house shortly after purchasing the property. 

About a year after Robert’s death, Viola sold the house and two lots to Norman “Turk” and Kathrine Wagoner who resided here until their deaths in the mid-1980s. The house passed through two other owners before Tommy and Megan Smith bought it in 1999.

The house is executed in a Williamsburg Revival form. “Williamsburg Revival” is not a nationally accepted architectural style, and historians, architects, and realtors usually refer to Williamsburg Revival cottages as Cape Cods. However, Carl Lounsbury, Williamsburg’s renowned and widely-published architectural historian, and North Carolina’s preeminent architectural historian, Catherine Bishir, attest to the reality of Williamsburg Revival as a subset of the Colonial Revival.[4]  

Both Cape Cod and Williamsburg Revival cottages have related roots. In the 1930s and in the post-war building-boom of the 1940s and early 1950s, builders and homeowners wanted Colonial Revival style houses, but could not afford the grand, expansive, forms of the 1910s and 1920s.

The original Cape Cod cottages and many Williamsburg houses were small dwellings and recreating them allowed owners of modest means to have the style they desired. 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.[5]

While the influence of Cape Cod Revival designs on North Carolina builders and architects cannot be discounted, Southerners were not necessarily keen on a style with New England antecedents. In the 1920s and into the 1950s, the Civil War’s outcome remained a fresh wound for some white Southerners. The last Confederate veterans were alive through the 1940s and plenty of white Southerners carried a variety of grudges against “Yankees.” Thus, rather than looking North, southeastern tastemakers, architects, builders, and homebuyers turned an eye to the on-going, well-publicized, and very popular restoration of Williamsburg.

Williamsburg Revival designs feature one-story forms with steep roofs, much like Cape Cods, but they introduce gabled dormers on the front roof slopes. Pilasters and entablatures highlight the front door, which is usually multi-paneled and sometimes contains a row of small lights across the top, mirroring or mimicking the diminutive transoms found above front doors in Williamsburg. Some front entrances include actual transoms. Williamsburg Revival houses do not feature front porches, but they almost always have a side porch, another regionally-specific attribute aimed at the Southern market where front porches had been a nearly universal house-feature since the eighteenth century.

The Shropshire-Wagoner embodies nearly all the features of a Williamsburg Revival design, including pilasters and an entablature at the front entrance, a side porch, and dormers on the front roof slope. The house, like the Cape Cod Small House at the southern end of Main Street, also illustrates the continued investment in the town long after it had lost the county seat.

Sarah Woodard David, 2016

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[1] William and Marjorie McIver to Robert and Viola Shropshire, Stokes County Deed Book 107, page 559, May 16, 1946.

[2] 1860 and 1870 U.S. Census, accessed via ancestry.com.

[3] William and Martha Tise to William N. Poindexter, Stokes County Deed Book 29, page 368, February 2, 1888.

[4] Catherine Bishir and Carl Lounsbury, email communications with the author, January 9, 2015.

[5] 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.