Norwood-Stamps House

(The information below in italics is from the Preservation Durham Plaque Application for the Norwood Stamps House)

The home is currently situated at 712 S. Buchanan Blvd (formerly Milton Avenue) in the West End  neighborhood. Early on, this street was home to predominantly African American laborers, just one  street west of the middle-class white neighborhood of Morehead Hill starting on Arnette Street. The  demographics are verifiable through city directory data and further evidenced by the Home Owners  Loan Corporation ‘redlining’ maps of Durham in the 1930s, which identifies the street as ‘Fourth-Grade:  Hazardous’, directly adjacent to a more optimistic ‘Third-Grade: Definitely Declining’ rating on Arnette  Street. Discriminatory practices such as these have created a cyclical loop that have kept historic  properties on this street unrecognized due to their states of disrepair or lack of restoration. For this  reason, and others, this area was not included in the Morehead Hill National Historic District at its  creation. The home at 712 is an example of an early wood-frame mill house – which are becoming  exceedingly rare – and maintains many original features, especially on the interior. Preservation Durham  has not recognized many of these humble residences in the past, but they are integral part of Durham’s  industrial history around the turn of the 20th century. 

The home’s property sits just west of downtown and by 1886 was owned by James B. Duke & family,  who subdivided a small parcel and sold the undeveloped land to an American Tobacco Company supervisor named John H Cox. This parcel included the house lots of current 712, 714, and 716 on the  newly-formed Milton Avenue. The land was sold in 1887 to George E. Love, a laborer. George Love  presumably died around 1900, and the property was transferred to his heirs James Love and John  Boone. Presumably James constructed three homes on the land by 1906, since city directory data shows  occupancy in all three by the 1907-08 publication. As a further complexity, the 1913 Sanborn map of  Durham shows the 700 block of Milton Street completely built-out, but documents an altered  numbering system than the current: 712 on current surveys is listed as 710 on the map. Thus, all city  directory data regarding the home before 1913 is assumed to be listed under the house number 710.  The exact tenants listed as living in 710 in 1913-14 (Nancy Stamps and Lizzie Norwood) are listed  together as living in 712 from 1915-1922, so it is fairly likely that the house numbers changed to the  current configuration at that time. 

James Love sold the property in 1906 with (presumably) three houses to WP Clements, a real estate  broker. Clements sold the property (still all three parcels together) to J G Ferguson in 1909, who then  sold to J E T Massey in 1910. In 1918, Massey sold the property to Durham Realty and Insurance  Company, which then sold the property to Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company a year later in 1919.  Liggett & Myers subdivided the property into three separate parcels at this time, which were redrawn to  their current configurations in October 1921 by surveyor E H Copley, recorded in Plat Book 4, Page 119.  Liggett & Myers sold the property to First National Trust Company, a large land-holding company, after  this subdivision in 1921. Louis Stadiem owned the property for a very short time, selling to Kemp P.  Lewis, then-secretary treasurer of Erwin Mills and real estate investor. Mr. Lewis later became president  of Erwin Mills and maintained ownership of the property for about 30 years until his death in 1952 .

TENANTS 
The first listed tenant of 710 Milton Avenue (now 712 S Buchanan) is William Sims & Edward Smith in  the 1905-06 Durham City Directory. Assuming that the data used in these directories was collected in  the year prior to publication, we can estimate the home was built and occupied by some time in 1904.  

Another observation is the use of the house as a duplex from its inception: the home had two front  doors onto the porch and a bisected, symmetrical layout. In 1907-08, Frank Barbee is listed as the sole  tenant, joined by Lucy Dodson in 1909-10. Eliza Atwater is listed as the sole tenant in 1911-12. Starting  in 1913, Nancy Stamps and Lizzie Norwood (each with sizable families) are listed as tenants. The 1920 US  Census provides more information about these two women and their families living in each side of the  home. They were both tobacco workers in the nearby mills and neither were supported by a husband – additional sources reveal that they were both newly widowed. Ms. Stamps remained a tenant for ten  years until 1922, and Ms. Norwood remained at the home for fifteen years until 1928. Since these two  women were long-term tenants of the home during its earliest periods, the author recommends the  home to be named for them rather than the original tenant who stayed just a year or the original owner  James (Jim) Love, who never occupied the house. Another significant owner that could be considered in  the naming is Kemp P. Lewis, President of Erwin Mills, who owned the property as a rental from 1923- 1951.

ARCHITECTURE 
This mill house was built in the Hall-and-Parlor family of folk houses (p140, Field Guide to American  Houses), a two-rooms-wide by two-rooms-deep simple structure. The front two rooms have a gabled roof structure with a center decorative gable on the front, with a simple shed roof over the rear two  rooms. The original construction included a front porch and single central brick chimney. The house also includes small details of the Folk Victorian style (p401, Field Guide to American Houses), including a  distinctive sawtooth shake pattern on all three gables and a wonderfully crafted Victorian mantlepiece.  The front two rooms have ten-foot-high ceilings, and decorative wainscot and chair rail not present in  the back two rooms. The home has a main frame of large heart pine timbers, resting on nine original  brick piers (32’ x 32’ square layout), plus another four piers supporting the front porch. The walls,  ceilings, and roof structural members are infilled with 2x4 studs on 24” centers, while the floor is framed  with 2x8 joists on 24” centers. Every interior surface of the home is clad with tongue-and-groove heart  pine boards, later partially covered by drywall.

 The exterior was originally clad in tapered pine siding  boards with 4 ½” exposure, and the roof was seamed metal (since replaced in previous renovation  work). A cursory visual inspection of house numbers 712, 714, and 716 reinforces the assumption that  all three were built in the same configuration and style, at almost the same time – recall that these  three homes once sat on a single undivided parcel until separated legally in 1921. The original central  brick chimney, made of soft-fired red brick in various stages of weathering, is accessed by two sides in  the front rooms, with carved wooden mantles and a cement hearth. The sizing of the fire box was clearly  intended for coal-burning use and later hosted coal burning stoves. The original paint colors of exterior  siding can be identified after investigating the built-up layers on the original wood: Canary Yellow,  Lavender, Periwinkle Blue, Light Green, Hunter Green. 

Some time in the early 1950s four small additional rooms were added to the rear of the home to provide  each duplex unit with a bathroom and kitchen. The 1913 Sanborn maps show only the original 4 rooms,  and the 1937 Sanborn maps (see attachment) show only a small room on the rear of the house, which
likely were demolished and a larger addition built just after the sale from Kemp Lewis’ estate (1952).  Two additional small brick chimneys were added at this time but subsequently removed.