The Domino Effect

The vigorous industrial activity of the period led to the construction of numerous downtown emporiums and country stores. Architectural innovation intensified after the war, as businessmen competed to erect the largest, best-located, most eye-catching store buildings in the county's rapidly growing towns. The Weatherspoon Building, erected in 1897 across Charlotte Avenue from the Sanford passenger depot, perfected the strategy with brightly painted architectural embellishments and signage captured the attention of shoppers, and large display windows showcased the wondrous range of factory-made merchandise contained within. The new commercial buildings created an exciting climate of consumerism on Downtown Sanford’s Chatham and Moore streets.

The town’s expanding industrial base required capital. To meet this need, perennial booster John W. Scott, Sr., and a newcomer, William J. Edwards, formed the Chatham, Moore & Harnett Bank in the late 1890s. At first the bank operated out of the Stroud Brothers Building on South Moore Street, but in 1901 it built a new home on the west corner of Wicker and South Moore streets. The three-story Commercial Building housed the bank and stores at street level, with office space and a meeting hall – the town “opera house” – above.

Sanford's rapid growth at the turn of the twentieth century also expanded the duties of its municipal government; consequently, in 1907, the search began for a town hall site. After two years of negotiation and planning, the town decided to build an office building and fire hall on the town spring lot on Charlotte Avenue. Local contractor Joe W. Stout began work on the two-story building in November 1909 and had it essentially finished by the spring of 1910. In addition to providing meeting space for official town business, the building's upstairs assembly hall served groups and individuals as diverse as the stockholders of the Edwards Motor Car Company, the Lee County Co-operative Marketing Association, gubernatorial candidates, and the Sanford public school system. The municipal building also served as the home of Sanford's volunteer fire department.

The industrial growth that centered on Market, Maple, and Sycamore streets inspired residential development on adjoining blocks. Soon the rambling Victorian homes of industrialists lined South Third Street, exemplifying the richly ornamented architecture adopted in Lee County during the late nineteenth century. The R&A brought the county into more direct contact with mainstream culture by linking it via Raleigh to the major urban and cultural centers of the Eastern Seaboard. The R&A made travel easier and exposure to the fashions of the outside world more likely, and it made mass-produced goods more accessible to Lee County consumers, gradually eroding the reliance on home manufactures and, by extension, local traditions of construction and design.

The railroad also changed the county's architecture through a broader transformation of the local economy. The lumber industry introduced new technologies for the manufacturing of materials. Local building material manufacturers such as the Sanford Sash & Blind Company flooded the market with standardized, professionally designed building components. Frame construction, once the exception in a county dominated by log buildings, became the norm. The expanding economy heightened demand for new construction, especially in the county's thriving towns, and the citizenry itself changed as enterprising individuals from other areas moved in, bringing with them cultural expectations that supplemented those of the indigenous population.

The Railroad House in Downtown Sanford is a prime example of the complex workings of the economic transformation on the county's domestic architecture. Built by the Western Railroad as a residence for its station agent, the 1872 Railroad House is a one-and-a-half-story frame dwelling with board-and-batten siding and Gothic Revival styling. The house represented something entirely new in Lee County. As a Gothic Revival building, the Railroad House broke with the Georgian/Greek Revival classicism that had dominated the architecture of the local elite. Also, unlike earlier houses, which were conceived and built by locally trained, vernacular builders, the Railroad House was the product of an architect or engineer associated with the railroad, an outsider well acquainted with the architectural currents of the national mainstream. Board-and-batten siding, dormers, interior chimneys, a transverse front-hall plan, and a coordinated palette of original exterior and interior paint colors further distinguished the house from the architecture that came before it. The picturesque styling of the Railroad House related it to other progressive architecture in the state-especially railroad architecture-and linked both house and community to the enlightened modernity of the outside world.

For factory workers, more modest one-story frame cottages filled the 250 lots of "Arlington Heights" the name once given to the residential area now known as East Sanford. The one-story, one-room-deep house was by far the most numerous housing type of the period because it was cheap to produce. Although small in scale, the house could be a source of pride; embellished with porches, bay windows, and milled ornamentation, it represented the form of choice for propertied blue-collar workers and small farmers. Over five hundred of these simple one-story one-room-deep houses survive in the county, probably half their former number.

In the early twentieth century, small dwellings known as shotgun houses appeared in low-income Sanford neighborhoods. The type was characterized by two or more rooms arranged one in front of the other, resulting in a linear form likened to the barrel of a shotgun. A handful survives on Washington Avenue and Waddell Street, near where the Sanford Sash & Blind plant once stood. A possibly related form, the so-called gable-fronted bungalow, gained popularity in the 1920s just as the last shotguns were being built locally. Today, over five hundred gable-fronted bungalows stand in the county.