The Warren County Community Center is significant as a facility that provided the county’s Black residents with a sense of community, safety, and support during the Jim Crow era. Completed in 1936, the Warren County Community Center served as a venue for Black residents to gather for social events and organizational meetings without the safety concerns of backlash from White residents. Resting areas and public bathrooms were provided for African Americans visiting government offices, utilizing professional services, or patronizing businesses in downtown Warrenton, where such facilities were not open to Black users. The building also housed a library for Black residents, who were excluded from the segregated Warren County Memorial Library. By the 1960s, the community center had become a center of the local Civil Rights movement as a meeting space for Civil Rights leaders including NAACP officials and local lawyers, as well as the gatherings they organized to discuss Civil Rights issues with the Black community.
The property was listed in the National Register in 2025.
Warren County Community Center
Warren County, NC
All Saints Episcopal Church
Warren County, NC
All Saints Episcopal Church is significant as a local church for African Americans that was supported by the North Carolina diocese and funded by private donors and Episcopal congregations nationwide. In 1893, All Saints Episcopal Church was established as an independent congregation, separate from the White Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Warrenton. As early as 1903, requests for funding for the construction of a dedicated building to house the church were placed in local papers, made before Episcopal convocations, and published in church periodicals with national circulation. Donations were received from individuals, congregations, and Sunday School programs as far away as New York, Ohio, and Georgia and the current sanctuary was completed in 1918, at the intersection of West Franklin and South Front Streets in Warrenton.The church was dedicated as a memorial to Warrenton native, Episcopal minister, and Civil Rights advocate Reverend Thomas White Cain. By the 1930s, this area emerged as the commercial and social core of the Black community in Warrenton, with the church itself hosting a parochial school, dances, and community outreach programs.
The church was listed in the National Register in 2025.
The Edward and Frances S. Loewenstein House is an outstanding example of Modernist-style architecture, designed by prominent local architect Edward Loewenstein as his personal residence. Key tenets of Modernist architecture include careful siting and orientation to take full advantage of the site; an integration of interior and exterior spaces both visually and through the use of natural materials; and an interior arrangement that includes open living spaces that flow into one another, and private bedrooms insulated from one another by storage and utility spaces. Design innovations engineered by Loewenstein for the building include canted exterior walls, the angle of which was carefully calculated maximize solar gain in winter and minimize direct light in summer; a chimneyless fireplace set into a glass wall; and skylights fitted both with shutters to reduce light infiltration and light bulbs to provide diffused light on cloudy days and at night.
Loewenstein's firm produced more than 1600 commissions, more than 400 of which were residential designs. Modernist designs were a small percentage of Loewenstein’s total commissions, but are among the best in the region.
The property was listed in the National Register in 2024.
Edward and Francis Loewenstein House
Guilford County, NC
Sidney Cotton Mill
Alamance County, NC
The Sidney Cotton Mill is a largely intact example of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century, Italianate-style, industrial architecture and of slow-burn industrial construction. Developed in the late-nineteenth century and codified by insurance companies, slow-burn construction was developed to as a cost-effective means of protecting textile mills from loss due to fire. The 1886 Sidney Cotton Mill was among the earliest steam-powered mills to be constructed in Alamance County and was only the second steam-powered mill, of at least five mills in total, to be constructed within the town of Graham. The mill, which was enlarged through the mid-twentieth century, features brick firewalls used to separate the various manufacturing processes: weaving, picking, spinning/carding. A three-story tower consolidated circulation to reduce the spread of fire and also supported a water tank. Italianate-style detailing includes segmental-arch window openings and corbelled brick cornices, as well as an intact, three-story tower on the south elevation.
The mill was listed in the National Register in 2024.
The 1955 Saint Catherine of Siena Catholic Church is locally significant as a rare example of the Spanish Eclectic style in Granville County. The church retains a cream-colored brick exterior, multi-curved parapet with inset rose window, an arcaded entry with red-tile roof, and distinctive round-arch multi-colored stained-glass windows, all characteristic of the style. Designed by the Greensboro, North Carolina, architectural and engineering firm of Andrews and McGeady, the building is nearly identical to two other Catholic churches in the state—the 1953 Our Lady of the Highways Catholic Church in Thomasville, North Carolina and the 1933 Saint Jude’s Catholic Church in Grifton, North Carolina—indicating the plan may have been disseminated by the Catholic church itself.
The windows were initially fitted with clear glass while the current stained glass windows were designed and constructed. The designs employed symbols, lettering, and simple geometric shapes to minimize the cost of the windows.
The property was listed in the National Register in 2023.
Saint Catherine of Siena Catholic Church
Granville County, NC
Minneola Manufacturing Company Mill
Guilford County, NC
In Minneola Manufacturing Company was established in 1886 by Berry and Joseph Davidson and incorporated in 1888. It is one of three textile mills in Gibsonville established around the turn of the twentieth century. In 1893, Ceasar and Moses Cone, who controlled a number of mills in nearby Greensboro, purchased a controlling interest in the mill. Throughout the early twentieth century, the Cone brothers enlarged and expanded the physical mill, which operated as a subsidiary of their Cone Export and Commission Company.
Resources on the 18-acre site include the full extant of buildings associated with textile production including a raw cotton warehouse, picker house, weaving mill, dye house, and cloth warehouse as well as smokestack, engine/boiler house, railroad siding and trestle, and two reservoirs.
The Minneola Manufacturing Company Mill is significant for Industry as Gibsonville's largest textile mill and the town's largest employer for much of the twentieth century. It is the only extant large-scale brick tobacco redrying plant or warehouse remaining in Sanford, illustrative of Sanford’s twentieth-century tobacco industry.
The mill complex was listed in the National Register in 2023.
The William Henry and Sarah Hauser Speas House in rural western Forsyth County is a rare, intact example of a prominent mid- to late-nineteenth century brick farmhouse exhibiting eclectic Romantic- and Victorian-era stylistic details applied to a national folk form. Built ca. 1850 as a two-story, Greek Revival-style I-house with the front entrance originally oriented to the west, the house was enlarged in 1879 with a two-story gabled wing on the west elevation. The expansion resulted in a core T-shaped plan with the entrance relocated to the north elevation of the 1879 wing and an asymmetrical façade, in keeping with national house forms popular in the late nineteenth century. Among the extant ancillary buildings that contribute to the property’s significance are the ca. 1879 brick curing house, a rare building type for the period, and a ca. 1879 wood frame granary.
The property was listed in the National Register in September 2018.
William Henry and Sarah Hauser Speas House
Forsyth County, NC
In the early twentieth century, Sanford developed a strong tobacco market serving Lee, Moore, Chatham, Harnett, and Hoke counties, the success of which necessitated the construction of several large-scale brick warehouse just west of the central business district. The opening of the Sanford Tobacco Company’s redrying plant in 1947 (the first redrying plant in Sanford and the only redrying facility for much of its history) put the Sanford market on par with such important tobacco markets as Durham, North Carolina and Danville, Virginia. The plant was enlarged in 1951 and again in the early 1960s as the tobacco market thrived. However, by 1975, the tobacco market had begun to collapse and the company closed the redrying facility.
The Sanford Tobacco Company Redrying Plant and Warehouse is significant for its association to the Sanford tobacco market and the broader tobacco industry in Lee County. It is the only extant large-scale brick tobacco redrying plant or warehouse remaining in Sanford, illustrative of Sanford’s twentieth-century tobacco industry. The property was listed in the National Register in August 2019.