Residential Neighborhoods Abound

The cozy house form popularly known as the bungalow made its first local appearance in Downtown Sanford's Rosemont neighborhood during the 1910s. Typically detailed with decorative windowpanes, gable brackets, and other Craftsman-style touches, the one-story or story-and-a-half bungalow appealed to those with progressive tastes but limited budgets. Related to the bungalow was the Foursquare, a boxy, two-story house that usually featured a hip roof with one or more dormers. Homebuilders in Sanford, Jonesboro, Broadway, and the county's smaller communities snipped bungalow and Foursquare plans out of magazines or wrote away for plans. Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, and other mail-order firms sold the houses as kits, complete down to door hardware and mantelpieces.

Around Downtown Sanford, bungalows, foursquares, and eclectic houses now known collectively as "period cottages" filled vacant lots in the town's older residential neighborhoods and dominated the two trend-setting subdivisions of the period: McIver Park and McCracken Heights. The developers of these neighborhoods utilized natural topography to create winding lanes and sweeping vistas. McIver Park's Sunset Drive, for example, traces a gentle S-curve with house lots on one side and a landscaped park, stream, and wooded bluff on the other.

The other novel development, McCracken Heights, was the pet project of Sanford dentist Frank Webb McCracken. In 1914, McCracken purchased an eighty-six-acre farm on Hawkins Avenue, north of downtown. Eleven years later, he hired the engineering firm of Poole & Cooke to layout curving streets on the property and in the late 1920s began to market the lots. Sanford architect L. M. Thompson and his wife Margaret bought a lot in 1929 and built the first house in the development, a picturesque brick and half-timbered Tudor Revival residence. McCracken's own residence, a brick Craftsman-style house, stands at one of the development's entrances on Hawkins Avenue.