Dr. Numa D. Bitting House

08.28.11

Dr. N.D. Bitting House. Dr. Bitting bought the lot in 1916 and had the house built. 

2-story hipped-roof Colonial Revival Prairie style house with front and side hip dormers, 12-over-1 sash windows, wood shake siding, and an exterior chimney. The porch has Craftsman posts, a plain railing. and a recessed balcony. The front French door has a transom and sidelights. 

(The information below in italics is from the Historic Preservation Society of Durham Plaque Application for the Dr. Numa D. Bitting House)

Dr. Numa Duncan Bitting (1877-1960) was born in Rural Hall, North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina and became a pharmacist, practicing in Durham. He then entered Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia and upon graduating, became a practicing physician. He was a physician with the Norfolk and Western Railway Co. for a time. He moved back to Durham sometime in the 1910s and in 1916, bought the property at 2501 W. Club Boulevard. This information is derived from an article in the Durham Sun at the time of his death (Durham Sun, January 19, 1960) and Hill's Durham Directory for 1916-1917. Bitting married Mattie Rigsbee (1879-1966) of Durham and they had two children, Mary Elizabeth (1915-1996) and Numa Duncan Bitting, Jr. (1916-1949). 

There was also a third child, Margaret H. (dates unknown), who poses something of a mystery. According to city directories of the 1920's, Miss Margaret Bitting resided at 2501 W. Club (Hill's 1926) and she appears as a surviving sister in Numa Bitting, Jr.'s obituary in 1949 . She is excluded from the list of survivors in the newspaper article about Dr. Bitting's death in 1960 and she is not listed as a child of Dr. Bitting in the family genealogical information posted on the internet . She does appear in the list of survivors in Mattie Bitting's obituary in 1966 . 
Sometime around 1927-1928, Dr. Bitting and his wife separated and they later divorced. Mattie Bitting continued to reside at 2501 W. Club Boulevard with her children, but Dr. Bitting resided elsewhere in town. He continued to own the Club Boulevard house, however. See Hill's Durham Directory entries for 1926-28 and the attached articles and obituaries. Late in life, Bitting married Mary Allred of Raleigh. Id. 

In 1949, Numa Bitting, Jr., died of a heart attack. He was 33 years old, married and the father of three children. According to his obituary in the Durham Morning Herald, he was residing at 2501 W. Club Boulevard when he died. He was associated with the tobacco marketing business although he is sometimes referred to as Dr. Numa Bitting in the city directories. This reference appears to be an error. 

In 1960, Dr. Bitting died. He left the house in trust to his daughter, Mary Elizabeth. Bitting's new wife, Mary Allred Bitting claimed her dower interest in the property and it was necessary to pay her a settlement to clear Mary Elizabeth's beneficial interest

Mattie Bitting continued to reside in the house at 2501 W. Club Boulevard until just before her death in 1966. 

Numa Bitting, Sr., Numa Bitting, Jr., and Mary E. Bitting are all buried in the family lot in section 6 of Maplewood Cemetery. Mattie Bitting is buried in lot 163 in the old section of Maplewood Cemetery. 
Mary E. Bitting, resided in the Club Boulevard house from the time she was an infant until 1981. At that time, the property was liquidated by judicial sale. It was purchased by Matthew D. Ralston, a Duke University medical student and resident. Miss Bitting died in 1996. See her obituary, attached. During his time in the house, Dr. Ralston married Katherine McCusick and they sold the property to the applicants in 1987 and they moved in a few months later. 

Dr. Leo Thomas Barber, III, is a doctor of internal medicine at Lincoln Community Health Center and his wife, Shannon Elaine St. John, was for 21 years the director of the Triangle Community Foundation. She is the founder of Second Star Philanthropic Services and is Director, Networks of the Synergos Institute. They reared their two sons, John and Lee, in the house. 

The house is remarkably little altered from the time of its building in 1916-1917. 

The Bitting house is a large, essentially cubical house with a pyramidal roof interrupted by hipped dormers on two sides and two very tall corbelled chimneys. The exterior is shingle-clad at both of the structure's two full stories. The one-story disengaged front porch is supported by craftsman style pier-and-post columns and covers a glazed double entry. The foundation of the house is dressed with rusticated irregular granite as are the piers supporting the porch. While the house displays some features commonly associated with the craftsman style, the overall lines and massing of the house are more suggestive of the prairie style with its emphasis on strong, unbroken horizontals. This is especially true of the deep knife cornice that surrounds the house at the eaves. The windows are all original and are lighted in a nine-over-one pattern for the principal windows and six- over-one for the secondary windows. 
The interior is arranged in a hurricane plan with the main rooms arranged around a square central hall communicating to all. The house retains its unusual Adam-style original interior woodwork. The living room mantelpiece features reed-work decoration. The stair hall on the east side of the house is large and lit by a large tripartite window at the landing. Originally the house had one full bath upstairs and a half bath downstairs. At some point early in the house's history, a second bath was added. The kitchen was updated in the 1960s or 70s. 

The house is a fine example of Club Acres as it was envisioned by its original developers - a streetcar suburb of fine modern homes for physicians and other professionals attracted to the area by the new Watts Hospital and Durham (Hillandale) County Club. The house is remarkable in that it has always been the home of physicians and their families.