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

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44 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 porticos on the central volume. Scholars have conjectured that this common tripartite massing is a vernacular deviation of the Randolph Semple House in Williamsburg.129 Another example of the tripartite form is the Crabtree Jones House [WA0025], built in 1795 in Wake County. Unlike the aforementioned tripartite houses, the Crabtree Jones House does not feature a front-gable roof/pedimented attic on the main volume. With its side-gable roofs on all three volumes,the Crabtree Jones House is the most similar in exterior appearance to Moorefields. Its differences lie in its size and configuration: the Crabtree Jones House is five bays wide, compared to Moorefields' three-bay facade, and the Crabtree Jones House is a hall-parlor plan with a centralized entrance, creating symmetrical fenestration.130 The house that has most in common—in terms of form and detail—with Moorefields is Sans Souci [OR0020] in Orange County. Built by William Cain, the owner of Hardscrabble, Sans Souci was meant as a town home, sited on the edge of Hillsborough. Like the Crabtree Jones House, Sans Souci is a tripartite form in which the center block is two full stories in height and is capped with a side-gable roof. Like Moorefields, the center volume is three bays wide with a full-width, one- story porch on the facade. Also like Moorefields, the flanking wings are one bay wide and two piles deep,but at Sans Souci the wings each have a dormer window,making the volumes one-and- a-half stories tall. San Souci's frame structure is clad in molded weatherboards, and the foundation is brick. On the interior, Sans Souci has a paneled spandrel under the stair and a full-height mantel in the parlor with diagonal reeding—details also found in Moorefields. Most significantly, Sans Souci's entry is off-centered, creating an asymmetrical facade and signaling an interior side- passage plan. For this reason, the author of the 1971 National Register nomination for Sans Souci believed that the house was "constructed in three major stages [and] was probably not conceived originally as a three-part house, for the central block which once stood alone has a side hall plan rather than the more typical center hall plan."131 Of the eight tripartite houses aforementioned—Graves House, William G. Smith House, Crabtree Jones House, Sally-Billy House, Shady Oaks,Little Manor,the Hermitage,and Sans Souci—seven have symmetrical fagades despite having various internal layouts, including cross-hall,transverse, hall-parlor, and center-hall plans. Sans Souci's and Moorefields' side-passage plans are distinctly atypical. This exception has caused the author of Sans Souci's nomination to speculate that the core was built like a common Georgian town home and that the wings were added later in the Federal period. This conjecture, by logical extension, brings the construction date(s) of Moorefields into question. Previous documentation of Moorefields—including the 1972 National Register nomination and the 1968 HABS recordation, among other secondary sources—assert that the building dates to circa 1785. This is likely predicated on the fact that Alfred Moore purchased 1,200 acres from Peter Mallett in January of 1784, and that language in that deed and other evidence suggest Moore was already practicing law in Hillsborough by the early 1780s.112 Family letters illustrate that a house existed at Moorefields by 1805 if not earlier, and so a more conservative date range for the building's construction is 1784-1805. This twenty-year range covers the transition in architectural fashions from the Georgian period to the Federal period, which would explain the variations of form and details present at Moorefields. The two decades may also have provided enough time for Moorefields to have been constructed additively, in Section 8 page 42