Elegant plantation house in Louisburg Historic District. Originally part of an expansive 90-acre plantation known as Fox Swamp. The house retains its historic grandeur and is a comfortable walk to the heart of downtown Louisburg.
Williamson House
Its remaining 1.7-acre historic landscape features mature magnolias, hollies, oaks, pecans, and crepe myrtles, and is accentuated with an original sunken alley lined with English boxwoods.
Restoration of the home has been completed by Dean Ruedrich, owner of Ruedrich Restorations and winner of the prestigious Robert E. Stipe award, the highest honor presented to working professionals who demonstrate an outstanding commitment to preservation in North Carolina.
“The restoration of this house has been a great adventure,” says Ruedrich. “It’s amazing what an old building will tell you if you know how to listen.” Mason P.W. Motley signed several bricks in the foundation before they were fired. Motley was the son-in-law of Gamaliel Jones, the architect and builder of the Main Building at Louisburg College as well as prominent houses throughout the area. “Not long after we started work, we also found a brick with the date 1858 scrawled into it,” says Ruedrich. “You’re rarely that lucky”.
A grand central hallway and thirteen-foot ceilings provide a feeling of spaciousness throughout the house. Aside from being fully restored and modernized, the woodwork and other interior features have been little altered. No two of the house’s five mantles – originally decorated with gold leaf – are the same. Faux painting techniques were used to make the heart pine doors look like oak and rosewood. The baseboards are marbleized. One hundred and fifty-three years after construction, the unbled heart pine siding, shutters, and porch posts are in perfect condition. “Kept painted, this wood will last another 150 years at least,” says Ruedrich. Unbled pine is timber harvested from trees not already tapped for resin.
While the Tempie Perry Williamson House is a window into pre-civil war North Carolina, two other structures on the property provide insight into the centuries before and after. Ruedrich adopted and moved in an eighteenth-century orphan. Georgian-style Hawkins Law Academy was built in 1790 and originally located north of Louisburg in the community of Ingleside. “It was ready to meet its maker”, says Ruedrich, who had the building moved on a flatbed trailer, its roof disassembled to clear power lines. “We scooped up the old granite stones and had a mason from Warren County relay the foundation and chimney”.
QR Code for Williamson House
Also featured is a one-room ticket booth from the early twentieth century that was built for the Franklin County Fair.
The Perry family had the largest land holdings in Franklin County before the civil war. Among Tempie Perry Williamson’s slaves was John Williamson, who after the war became a prominent black legislator and founder of the Raleigh Banner and Raleigh Gazette.
Williamson House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
This is a synopsis of a write up by Cynthia Satterfield that can be found at TempiePerryWilliamsonHouse.com
Also check out Flikr and use the QR Code in the photo.
A lot to choose from this weekend!
