Downtown Goes MO-DERN

The optimism and prosperity that followed the war translated into a progressive spirit in architecture. Brick manufacturer Lewis D. Isenhour blazed the trail when in 1949 he hired Raleigh architects Jesse M. Page, Jr., and William Correll to design a modern brick residence at 300 Carbonton Road. The angled plan of the Isenhour House and its sweeping horizontal massing owe much to the Usonian house designs of America's foremost modern architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Within two years the Isenhour House was joined on nearby Chisholm Street by real estate developer Bryant Johnson's "new ranch style home," a one-story flat-roofed residence with picture windows and portholed metal garage doors. Ranch houses like the Bryant Johnson residence came to dominate local domestic construction during the third quarter of the twentieth century.

Modernism also extended to institutional and commercial architecture in downtown after the war. In the late 1950s, the National Bank of Sanford selected one of the state's foremost modernists, A. G. Odell, Jr., of Charlotte, and Sanford contractor L. P. Cox to design and build its new Steele Street branch. The bank, described in the local press as being of "startling contemporary design," featured a gray brick exterior and a facade shielded by an anodized aluminum sunscreen. In 1955, the Wilrik Theater, a large one-screen theater with its lighted marquee was constructed at 327 Carthage Street using modernistic elongated bricks. The theater served as the only large scale entertainment in downtown until its closing in 1985.

When the Lee County Hospital accepted its first patient in August 1931, the event represented the fulfillment of a "lifetime dream" of Dr. W. A. Monroe. Monroe was the first director of the twenty-one-room Central Carolina Hospital, opened in 1906. Along with fellow physician and hospital director Charles L. Scott, Monroe pushed hard in the 1920s for the construction of a larger and more up-to-date facility. The hospital backers acquired a site on the edge of the fashionable McIver Park subdivision, and contractor Joe W. Stout began work on the building in July 1930. At first the hospital contained fifty beds; by 1953 there were over a hundred beds, and the facility's 102 employees placed it among the top ten employers in the county. It served in that capacity until 1981 when it became the Lee County Government Center. Today, the Lee County Government Center serves as the main building for most of the 479 County employees, and continues to be a major employer for Downtown Sanford.