Agenda 02-03-2026; 8-i - National Register Recommendation for Moorefields

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43 United States Department of the Interior National Park Service/National Register of Historic Places Registration Form NPS Form 10-900 OMB Control No.1024-0018 Moorefields (Additional Documentation) Orange County, N.C. Name of Property County and State These similarities, however, are superficial. While Heartsease has a hall-parlor plan, Moorefields has a side-passage layout. The hall-parlor was common among contemporary houses in the region, such as the Mordecai House [WA0034] built circa 1785 in adjacent Wake County and Hardscrabble [DH0005] in Durham County. The oldest section of the frame Mordecai House was originally one-and-a-half stories but was raised to two full stories later.124 Hardscrabble is two houses (one Georgian-style built before 1779, and one Federal-style built in the early 1790s)built back-to-back and later connected by a hyphen. The later section was built by John Cain before 1794 by a Hillsborough artisan, Samuel Hopkins. Like Moorefields, this portion of Hardscrabble is three bays wide and is frame construction atop brick piers. Hardscrabble also has a mantel in which "the wide surround is diagonally reeded," like the parlor mantelpiece at Moorefields.125 However, unlike Moorefields, all three of these hall-parlor plans had symmetrical facades at the start. Moorefield's off-centered entry, creating an asymmetrical fenestration pattern, is atypical and the house's side-passage plan makes it an outlier.126 All of the aforementioned houses either have a rectangular block or (as additive buildings) a telescoping footprint and simple massing. Moorefields,in contrast,has a tripartite form, and while the current footprint is rectangular with the enclosure of the north porch in the mid-20th century, its original footprint would have been more akin to a shallow U shape. Although Moorefields has three distinct volumes, the execution of the tripartite form is unlike any other contemporary and comparable tripartite house remaining in the state let alone the region. One of the earliest examples of a wood-frame tripartite house in the Piedmont is the Graves House [CS0004] in adjacent Caswell County. Built for Solomon Graves circa 1785-1795, the Graves House is essentially a two-story, three-bay, central block flanked by one-story wings—as is Moorefields. But this Georgian-style residence has a cross-hall plan and a symmetrical fagade. More importantly,while the wings have side-gable roofs, the core has a front-gable roof, creating a pedimented attic that would come to characterize all of other remaining examples of tripartite houses in the region.121 The William G. Smith House [GVO11] in neighboring Granville County is a transitional Georgian- to Federal-style residence built between 1790 and 1816. Also massed as a two-story central block with flanking one-story wings, the William G. Smith House looks nothing like Moorefields from the exterior,as the double-height core has a front-gable roof that creates(like at the Graves House) a pedimented attic. As the 1987 National Register nomination for the William G. Smith House stated,"The exterior appearance of the house is quite similar to that of a small number of dwellings built in North Carolina's border, old tobacco belt counties in or near the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth, six of which are pictured in Mills Lane's Architecture of the Old South, North Carolina. Two of these six were raised to the west—the William Bethel House, Rockingham County, c. 1790, and the Solomon Graves House, Caswell County, c. 1790—and four to the east in Halifax County..."128 Likely, two of the four tripartite houses in Halifax County just referenced are the Sally-Billy House [HX0010] and The Hermitage [HX0005]. Built circa 1800, the Sally-Billy House is considered a transitional Georgian- to Federal-style house with a front-cross hall and a symmetrical fagade. The Hermitage was built for Thomas Blount Hill between 1808 and 1810. This early Federal-style house has a central-hall plan and a symmetrical fagade. Both houses exhibit pedimented attics with mirroring pedimented Section 8 page 41