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Claiborne & Frances Montgomery House

(Courtesy of Lappegard Photography, March 2019) Featured in the 2019 Preservation Durham Home Tour (text in italics below from the tour booklet): For at least nine Durham families, the unassuming home at 1412 Dollar Avenue has been the stage for their realization of the American Dream. A young florist, a rising bank employee, an entrepreneurial...

Edward J. Evans House

(Courtesy of Lappegard Photography, March 2019) Featured in the 2019 Preservation Durham Home Tour (text in italics below from the tour booklet): Formerly part of the estate of Miss Demerius Dollar, the land in the northern part of Trinity Park sits was divided into lots for sale in 1925. Development stalled with the onset of the Depression...

2118 Ruffin St. – Tommy & Bonnie Hay House

(Courtesy of Lappegard Photography, March 2019) Featured in the 2019 Preservation Durham Home Tour (text in italics below from the tour booklet): Construction on the house at 2118 Ruffin Street was begun in 1946 and it was completed in early 1947. It was one of more than a dozen houses being built at the same time by the developer of Glendale...

Edith M. Adderton House

(Courtesy of Lappegard Photography, March 2019) Featured in the 2019 Preservation Durham Home Tour (text in italics below from the tour booklet): Among the very first homes built and sold in Glendale Heights was 616 Colgate Street. Built in 1946, the house embodies the Minimal Traditional style described in the 1940 Federal Housing Administration’s...

Fox-Carr House

(Courtesy of Lappegard Photography, March 2019) Featured in the 2019 Preservation Durham Home Tour (text in italics below from the tour booklet): The lovely Colonial Revival house at the center of the Hillandale Commons development was not, despite its surroundings, ever intended to be a suburban house. It was instead designed and built to be the...

1708 Englewood Ave.

(N. Levy, 03.06.2019) County tax records date this two-story house to 1920, which would make it the oldest house on this block at the western edge of Walltown. While it does differ from the surrounding homes - mostly of 1940s vintage - in size and style, this date takes a bit of imagination to square with the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. Here's the...

3912 Erwin Road

(N. Levy, 03.07.2019) This house on the right side of Erwin Road as you go southwest between 751 and Cornwallis had caught my eye a couple of times before I pulled over recently to snap the picture above. Efforts to crowd source information about the history of the property with a Find Out Friday posting on Open Durham social media - @opendurhamnc...

Durham Green Book Destinations

Even before the recent Oscar win for the 2018 film Green Book, there's been a long overdue spike in interest about the actual directory the movie title references - The Negro Motorist Green Book, published for three decades starting in 1936 by a New York City postalworker named Victor Hugo Green. Well aware of the rich history of black-owned businesses in the Bull City - only a small fraction of which were ever featured in the Green Book - Open Durham is initiating a project to better document the sites listed here in our community.

Fragment of a drawing of the Duke Cigarette Factory, undated.

What's It Wednesday?!

An ever-expanding cheatsheet (or explorers' map) from past posts in the "What's It Wednesday?!" series on our social media accounts. Would you have been able to pick out these places from a single picture?

1005 Crete Street

(Durham County Tax Records) This ranch-style house was built in the mid-1950s for the prominent African-American doctor Clemuel Durham Grandy, Sr., and his family. The property was a combination of lots for two adjacent, new developments that were underway at the time on the west side of Highway 55 south of Third Fork Creek. (Durham County Register...