Staffers at the State Historic Preservation Office (HPO) still refer to this house as the “Newest Oldest House” in North Carolina, and its discovery is as much of the story as is its antiquity.
A constituent’s call in 2012 to the HPO’s Restoration Specialist Reid Thomas, based in our Greenville Eastern Office, came when workers discovered during standard electrical renovations what they termed “medieval” framing in what was believed to be a typical 19th century mill village house in Edenton. The house’s internal framing appeared to be much earlier than the late 1800s, but rather featured more robust timbers, earlier saw marks, decorative molding, and mortise and tenon joinery.
Further research and investigation led to dendrochronology – the dating of the house’s wood itself through scientific analysis of a tree’s rings – being performed, verifying the timbers from which the house was built were felled in 1718, coincidentally the year that the town of Edenton was founded. Uniquely, given Edenton’s status as a port city, part of an early ship’s timbering was identified as part of the house’s framing.
The private owner voluntarily decided to leave the house as a “study” building so that this earliest known extant example in North Carolina of colonial, English-derived building techniques could be better understood and appreciated, and generously donated it to the nonprofit Penelope Barker Foundation.
Previous to this discovery, the oldest known house in North Carolina was understood to be at Sloop Point in Pender County, believed to date from 1726. The North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office’s Restoration Services Branch provides valuable technical preservation assistance and on-site consultation for owners of historic buildings throughout North Carolina in the way of a Preservation Extension Service, and each county is part of a regional service territory handled by a Restoration Specialist. This system is rather unique in the national network of State Historic Preservation Offices, making it a very valuable constituent service offered by our state to help North Carolinians preserve historic properties from Murphy to Manteo.
Learn more:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130201025923/
http://news.ncdcr.gov/2013/01/16/discovery-of-the-oldest-dated-house-in-north-carolina/
https://www.publicradioeast.org/pre-news/2013-02-05/states-oldest-house-revealed-in-edenton
Preservation North Carolina’s Shelter Series: Dendrochronology and Dating NCs Historic Buildings (2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CtAc_Jl7x4
Image credits: Reid Thomas, NC State Historic Preservation Office