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

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45 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 successive stages;however,no previous scholars of Moorefields have ever suggested that evidence exists that Moorefields was not constructed in one single phase. Much could also be inferred about the fact that many of the Federal-period houses that have similar interior finishes date slightly later than Moorefields. For example, the Chinese Chippendale stair balustrade at the Sally-Billy House [HX0010] in Halifax County dates to the house's assumed construction date of circa 1800,while the Chinese Chippendale stair railing at Elmwood[GV0145] in Granville County dates to 1805. Although the stair at Haywood Hall [WA00018] in Wake County is enclosed from the first to the second floor, the stair from the second floor to the attic is decorated with a Chinese Chippendale railing. Haywood Hall was built between 1792 and 1800, making it a closer contemporary to Moorefields yet still several years later than Moorefields' presumed starting construction date of 1785. Additionally, the refined diagonal reeding on the parlor mantelpiece's entablature at Moorefields is similar to examples found at Hardscrabble (ca. 1790) in Durham County [DH0005], Shady Oaks (ca. 1800-1812) in Warren County [WR0012], Sans Souci (1813) in Orange County [OR0020], and the Mallett House (ca. 1823) in Orange County[OR0055].But who is to say that the diagonal reeding found at the latter two houses,which certainly postdate Moorefields, were not informed or influenced by Moorefields itself? Perhaps the interior finishing at Moorefields was influenced by other early 19th-century houses and were installed later, after the house's initial construction, by Alfred Moore, Jr. Or, perhaps other examples of Chinese Chippendale railings and diagonal reeding entablatures did exist in houses dating to the 1780s and 1790s but those examples no longer exist and were never documented. In summation,Moorefields has no clear precedents in form or detail.It is an outlier among tripartite houses in terms of scale, execution, asymmetry,plan, and even age. It is somewhat of an outlier in its time period in terms of its exterior asymmetry, its side-passage plan, its original U-shaped footprint,and interior finishes.All that can be said of Moorefields is that it is rather unique. Likely, Moorefields' architecture is a pastiche of elements that Moore observed in his travels or in the Cape Fear region. Family lore asserts that Moorefields house was constructed by seven enslaved laborers and took three years to complete (i.e., circa 1785-1788).133 Given that the Moores enslaved dozens of African Americans in this period, and given that several of these enslaved laborers are known (through the documentation of slave transactions) to have been skilled craftsmen (such as carpenters and bricklayers), this origin story is highly probable. Very likely, these enslaved artisans and workers came from the Moores' coastal plantation, Buchoi. The design of the Moorefields house may also be explained by the prevalence and popularity of pattern books. With the dearth of professional architects in colonial America, higher-end designs were typically achieved by itinerant craftsmen and builders who referred to architectural pattern books. One such book that had achieved resounding success among wealthy Americans by the mid-18th century was Andrea Palladio's Four Books of Architecture (1570). In this book, Palladio produced drawings of Renaissance villas in the Veneto region that were constructed in a tripartite plan, with a large central core flanked by two smaller dependencies connected by hyphens. Palladian-style buildings were first constructed in Rhode Island in the late 1720s and 1740s. The Hammond-Harwood House (1774) in Annapolis, Maryland, and Thomas Jefferson's first design of Monticello (1770) in Charlottesville, Virginia, are two examples of Palladian, tripartite villas. Section 8 page 43