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

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49 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 Given Draper-Savage's recorded interest in both the fine arts and historic preservation, he was presumably aware of these precedents, which had garnered national attention."' Furthermore, it would appear that after he retired from teaching French at the University of North Carolina, Draper-Savage refocused his energy on creating gardens at Moorefields. Like the Garden Club of North Carolina's Elizabethan Gardens, Draper-Savage designed formal garden rooms that would not have been found on the historic Moorefields landscape during the tenures of either Alfred Moore. Rather,Draper-Savage's elegant gardens were historically-influenced revivals intended to enhance the historic house's curtilage. As an amateur landscape designer, Draper-Savage was not alone. The Merritt-Winstead House in Roxboro (Person County), North Carolina, contains a number of garden spaces crafted between the 1920s and the 1940s by the property owner and amateur gardener, Ellen Coxe Merritt. The Rock Walled Boxwood Garden, started circa 1925, featured a low,rubble-stone and concrete wall enclosing a V-shaped area just southeast of the house. Originally,Merritt planted perennials in this space but installed boxwoods at some point before 1950.152 Draper-Savage used rubble and concrete as the primary materials for his garden structures, including the Kitchen (East) Garden Terrace and the North Parterre Garden Terrace. Isabelle Bowen Henderson, an artist(trained as a painter), added several eclectic garden spaces to her one-acre property in west Raleigh, starting in 1937-38. Her gardens were included on the local garden tours in 1938, 1939, and 1940; featured in the April 1942 issue of House and Garden magazine; and described in Elizabeth Culbertson Waugh's 1967 publication, North Carolina's Capital, Raleigh. The Front Garden was an English-style perennial border that was screened from the roadway by tall fences and an eleagnus hedge, and the irregularly-shaped space east of the house was surrounded by curving, brick-paved walks. In addition to its naturalistic planting beds, Henderson planted"ornamental trees and shrubs [to] sequentially frame and close views along the walks and provide backdrops for the intervening herbaceous material."153 The Back Garden, southwest of the main house, was comprised of a grid of nine, rectilinear demonstration and production plots in which Henderson grew the specimens for her show gardens. Curvilinear planting beds were again interspersed with ornamental trees and shrubs. In contrast to these, the Herb Garden was a formal parterre garden occupying the quadrangle between the main house- cum-studio, the carriage house, the guest house, and the herb house. Adjacent to the large brick terrace Henderson built between the separate,detached buildings,the parterre garden was enclosed on the north and west by a low picket fence. "In plan view, the compact and compartmentalized herb garden rephrases its five-part Elizabethan English antecedent," in which"slightly raised beds result from the geometry of narrow basketweave brick paths with raised edging" that surround a "diamond-shaped center [that] is paved rather than planted, enabling seating."154 Henderson's gardens marked "the earliest known example of the Williamsburg Revival design movement in Raleigh. ,155 As it was featured in national as well as local publications as well as open to the public on three successive annual garden tours, Draper-Savage was surely aware of it. Draper-Savage's garden rooms at Moorefields are not unlike these Piedmont domestic garden precedents in their use of formalism and Colonial Revival as well as Beaux-Arts tropes.His earliest garden, on the ground by 1955, is the West Parterre Garden immediately adjacent to the house's Section 8 page 47