Elkton Green now stands, somewhat startled it must be admitted, in downtown commercial Falls, NC. It is within easy take-out distance of both a Hardee’s and a Colonel Sanders, alas. Three years back, we personally planted fast-growing Leyland cypresses to screen out such blight. The mansion rests on 2.4 acres of its original 880. It is just around the corner from the White-Rooker–designed Gothic Revival courthouse. (Would it be immodest to mention our organization’s having saved this masterwork in January 1983?) Elkton Green still holds a place of honor along Summit Avenue, a street lined with other Victorian mastodons and the magnolias planted by Falls’s “Betterment Committee” in 1891. Why the four-car garages, aluminum outbuildings, and easy parking for 500 (count ’em) cars? Genteelly put, … Elkton Green was, during the late 1950s, transformed into Falls’s finest white funeral establishment. I say, there must be life after embalming for Elkton Green! Pul-lease?

Falls is located just off I-95 and I-40, the main byways linking Miami and New York. This certainly helps give Elkton Green, with its extensive leaded windows, arched interior doorways, Vermont-marble rose-and-lotus-carved hearth facings, its commodious rooms and ingenious still-working system of dumbwaiters, great potential as a going Bed and Breakfast. (If that is what it takes to save it.) Anyone who has seen and loved Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, anyone who has ever nursed a fantasy of issuing one’s own white-draped daughter from the head of a great staircase featuring the period’s requisite bronze of bare-bottomed Mercury (he’s there), needs to see (then save) this brave survivor.

It’s a very big house built to edify, impress, and perhaps slightly terrify this little town. For a moot $210,000, it’s yours to use—as gently or as bullingly—as you see fit.

Square Feet: 6,899. Lot: 2.4 acres. Zoning: Bi (central business). Revolving Funds available immediately. Plus ample parking for your next garden party of 650 guests, for your own (second or third?) wedding, or hygienic facilities befitting your (first) funeral! Everything’s ready. We know you’re out there. It’s yours, please.

The history (& the croquet) come free.

CELEBRATING THE LIFE OF
THEODORE HUNTSABLE WORTH
VOLUNTEER INTERIM EDITOR: MARY ELLEN BROADFIELD

You have just read the last “Available for Restoration” note actually written by our much-missed leader, gadfly, and inspiration, Theodore “Tad” Worth. I was just one of the many people touched by him. I am but one of the countless fortunates now living in houses Tad saved from the bulldozer. I feel I must make a few remarks. Some will be statesmanlike and formal (as is our wont, we preservationists!). Others will, no doubt, prove utterly uncalled-for, and therefore of a sort I think he’d like.

I. A Perhaps Too Personal Reflection

First I only knew Tad Worth socially, as everybody did. But I can’t say I counted Tad a close friend.