PRESERVATION NEWS
ISSUE # 14 • HISTORIC NORTH CAROLINA HOME PRESERVATION

Preservation News, being a publication dedicated to saving historic structures of North Carolina, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and generous donors just like you.

For Elizabeth Matheson, and for Myrick Howard

AVAILABLE FOR RESTORATION:
ELKTON GREEN

Located: downtown Falls, NC,
Person County, 2.4 acres

Elkton Green is the pre-eminent bracketed Victorian gingerbread mansion in northeastern North Carolina. It will be leveled by wreckers if some fairy-god-purchaser is not found by April 1. Help us, please?

Preferably somebody with plenty of good sense, mad about history, alive to the finer nuances of strong-armed social pretense, and with a discretionary income to sort of match. Pretty please? Little family foundations are always nice. We just know you’re out there.

Fact is, we have got two extensions from the very cooperative Falls Town Zoning Board. But even with a treasure like Elkton Green, this, my friends, is our literal last chance. Already bids have come in for the pearwood-and-mahogany parqueted spiral staircase, for all the stained glass; but these are bids from a chain restaurant that will perform a mastectomy, that will then wedge bits of the mansion’s exquisite features into separate franchises where people order their quite bad beef awfully overcooked. Large portions of too-buttered “garlic bread” are intended to distract them. It makes us swoon, the thought. Perish it.

Built in 1856 for the Penner-Coker family, this high Victorian “pile” seems to have been inspired by the minarets of the Prince’s “Folly” Pavilion at Brighton. Elkton Green retains its Tudor rose medallions and endearingly redundant cornices. Even its brackets are bracketed. A gracious, indeed show-off, home in the downtown Historic Summit District, we are talking 24 rooms; we’re talking porches enough to accommodate every banished smoker left alive in Falls, NC. Lavish plantings survive, including a mature box maze (needs work, as mazes, alas, tend to).

The lawn, rolling clear down to the River Tar, is a fine acre and a half. We speak now of a lawn so suitable for croquet, I’ll throw in my own best 1920s Wilson set, and just leave it up for you to look at, and get vague credit for.

Elkton Green’s West Wing features a faux-Romanesque capital set directly beside one that might be called “Adirondack Carnival Ecclesiastical Ecstatic.” Our “righthand person,” the inimitable Mary Ellen Broadfield, said, “This home is like some lady from a very good family who’s had entirely too much coffee and feels forced to try on every hat in a third-rate shop, all at once.” There are sane people who consider the house overornamented. But for us, the mansion’s gingerbread detailing represents Elegance pushed—testing—clear to the edge of Comedy. (Which is just where some of us most long to live!)