If you look at Mount Airy’s downtown you’ll see a snapshot of architecture from about 1880 to about 1930. If you go out into the neighborhoods you’ll see areas from Victorian times, from the Craftsman Revival, Modernist homes and more. The buildings tell the stories of the people who lived and worked in them. Preservation districts endeavor to protect that story.
Some sections of town show the accomplishments of men and women who, in the years following the Civil War, built back from the economic ravages of the ‘Lost Cause’ to a thriving tobacco, textile, and manufacturing boomtown.
Fortunes were lost as formerly wealthy planters and businessowners struggled to recover. The generation who came of age here during and just after the Civil War were a special breed, hungry for success and willing to shed the constricting limitations of old traditions that didn’t work well with the new economic realities they dealt with.
Recognizing the need to educate their children if the region was going to thrive, leaders such as attorney and three-time-mayor of Mount Airy William F. Carter, Sr. organized school boards that established free public schools.
Tobacco was still king here but if they had learned anything from the economic hardships after the war it was the need for diversity. They took risks and started textile and furniture concerns.
Local men like Zachery Taylor Smith, Benjamin Franklin Sparger, and Stephen Porter Graves were driven to build. When the largest hotel in town burned to the ground in 1892, they were part of the share company created to build it back. Sparger and Smith grew tobacco and built warehouses to attract farmers with crops to sell.
When the railroad arrived in 1888, they actively promoted the town and her business prospects across the state and into surrounding states. As the adage says, success attracts success.
Stephen Hale from a long-established retail family in Grayson County, Virginia, saw opportunity in the growing town at the foot of the mountains. He became one of the best-known retailers in Mount Airy in the early 1900s. Alfred E. Smith of Guilford County moved here to establish a furniture manufacturing company. Sam Hennis came from Rockingham County to manage the Mount Airy Produce Exchange that so many farming families relied on.
The editor of the Mount Airy News lauded the accomplishments of these and other business leaders in January 1908.
“During the past three years so far as we can see, hardly a back step has been taken along any line. … On every street in town there have been erected many beautiful and substantial residences. Some of these are costly and have all the most modern conveniences.” Of the 14 homes mentioned in the editorial, eight were demolished to make way for progress within 80 years.
Beginning in the 1930s communities across the nation started enacting preservation policies to identify architecture and sites of historical significance and searching for ways to make it more attractive to property owners to maintain the buildings than to tear them down.
The Mount Airy Restoration Foundation sponsored a National Register Historic District nomination that came to a close in 1985. The process included a detailed survey of the town’s history, the architectural styles, significance, and uses of many buildings in and near town, and created a report that resulted in the Mount Airy Historic District being registered, a district that included the homes that remained on that list from 1908.
Buildings must “retain architectural integrity and reflect an aspect of the area’s history” according to the National Park Service web site. The survey identified hundreds of buildings that met the criteria by capturing the essence of a Southern town at the turn of the last century and the industries that sustained it.
Thanks to the continuing efforts of those interested in preserving the town’s unique history and beauty, Mount Airy is on the verge of expanding the district again. This time to include, among others, buildings on West Lebanon Street, industrial sites near the 601 and 52 intersection and Church Street.
May is National Historical Preservation Month. Take a drive or a stroll around town and really look at some of the beautiful buildings. They tell a story of a town that has persevered through adversity for 135 years.
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com