Frame

Eugene Morehead and George Watts were pioneers in the area that would become Morehead Hill when they built their houses on the western side of Lee (later Duke) St. in 1880. As the activity in the neighborhood increased, WT Blackwell sought to purchase the land on the eastern side of Duke St., directly across from their houses, to build worker...

Eugene Morehead's house, looking west-southwest from S. Duke St. - 1895. (Courtesy Duke Archives)

Louis A. Carr, despite the familiar last name, was not directly related to Julian Carr; rather he came to Durham from Baltimore in the late 1880s or early 1890s. He became a partner with Samuel T. Morgan in the Durham Fertilizer Company, and along with Julian Carr and George Watts, he formed the Interstate Telephone and Telegraph company in 1894, about which I've written more here.

The earliest grand houses on the east side of Durham were built along Roxboro and the first two blocks of East Main St. east of the intersection of those two streets. Some of the early, more forgotten names in Durham history - Day, Lyon, Fuller - industry magnates who faded from the scene as business consolidated around the Blackwell/Carr and, later, Duke empires. Few records of these early houses remain, except for intriguing footprints on the early Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, and most of them did not survive the early 20th century.

Looking west from the intersection of N. Queen and E. Main (in the foreground), 1940. This blurry shot gives a sense of the pattern of houses on the west side of the 100 block of N. Queen St., typically large houses, somewhat less grand than those that once existed along East Main (a few of which are still visible in this view.) There are no good...

Built in the 1930s for park ranger use, the so-called Lavender House in Northgate Park was the mid-1940s home of the Durham Children's Museum, before it moved to larger quarters and eventually became the Museum of Life and Science. Long used for storage, the wooden frame was demolished after repeated flooding in 2014, with the stonework left behind as a kind of memorial.