Samuel Harrison Reed House

1.   Name and location of the property: The building is known as the Samuel Harrison Reed House, and is located at 119 Dodge Street, Asheville, North Carolina. The property nominated includes all of tax lot 93, sheet 3, ward 7.

2.   Name, address, and telephone number of present owner: Marguerite H. Turcot 119 Dodge Street Asheville, NC   28803 (704) 274-1604

3.   Representative photographs of the property;  Photographs of the property are included with this report. Other photographs, taken at the time of the National Register nomination, are on file at the office of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 109 E. Jones Street, Raleigh, NC 27611

Location map: This report contains a location map derived from County tax map, showing all propex-ty nominated.

Current Deed Book reference of the property ; a Buncombe,  The property is listed as Ward 7, Sheet 3, Lot 93 in the tax records and is listed in the Buncombe County Register of Deeds Book 1080, Page 0657.

Historical sketch and architectural description of the property:  This report contains an historical sketch and architectural description prepared for the Historic Resources Commission of Asheville and Buncombe County.

Documentation of why and in what ways the property meets the set forth in N.C.G.S. 160A - 399.4 : a.   Historical and cultural significance:

The Samuel Harrison Reed house, a massive Queen Anne style frame residence, is a rare and little altered remnant of the grand lifestyle associated with the seat of a pre-Biltmore country estate. One of the largest and finest houses in Victorian period Buncombe County, the Reed house was built on a hilltop overlooking the village of Best by Samuel Harrison Reed, a wealthy local attorney who represented the George W. Vanderbilt estate and Chimney Rock, Incorporated.

Suitability for preservation; The Samuel Harrison Reed House is in good structural condition and is in the process of being restored. Altered very little since construction, the building retains most of its interior architectural fabric.

Restoration, maintenance  or Cost  of  acquisition, repair; Cost estimates for completion of the restoration have not been obtained, but it is assumed that the owner will be responsible for repairs.

Possibilities of adaptive or alternative use of the property:  Although built as a single-family residence, the Reed house was crudely split into apartments in later years. Since 1972 the house has again been converted to a single-family home, and is currently in use as a seasonal bed-and-breakfast inn.

Appraised value:  The appraised value of the house is $18,800 and the land $10,500, for a total value of $29,300.

Administrative and financial responsibility of any organization willing to underwrite all or a portion of such costs:  The Historic Resources Commission has no plans to acquire this property. It is assumed that all costs associated with restoration and maintenance will be met by the owner of the property.

Documentation of why and in what ways the property meets the criteria established for inclusion on the National Register: The evidence provided by this report, its inclusion in the Buncombe County Historic Properties Inventory, and its inclusion in the Biltmore Village National Register Historic District indicate demonstrably that the Samuel Harrison  Reed  House  does   meet  the   criteria  for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.

8.   Documentation of  why and  in what  ways the  property is of historical importance to Buncombe County; The Historic Resources Commission believes that the Samuel Harrison Reed House is significant to the history of Buncombe County because of its excellent Queen Anne architecture, its wealth of fine quality interior detailing, and its association with the pre-Biltmore Village of Best.

The Reed house was constructed in 1892 for Samuel Harrison Reed, eldest son of Joseph and Katherine Miller Reed. "Joseph Reed was born in the home established by his grandparents, Eldad Reed and Ashea Lanning Reed, 10 miles east of Asheville on Cane Creek. When he married Katherine Miller they settled in the home of his parents, John and Lavinia McBrayer Reed, on Gashes Creek, and it was there their seven children were born."1

Harmon Reed and Abraham Reed were ordered by the Buncombe County Court, January, 1794 session, to serve on a road-building crew at "the ford of Cane Creek,"z so the Reed family had likely been in Buncombe County for several generations when Joseph Reed was born on May 7, 1827. Joseph Reed received a Captain's commission in the Confederate States Army from George W. Randolph, Secretary of War, in Richmond, Virginia on November 10, 1861, and was stationed at the "Armory of the Confederacy" in Asheville. He saw active duty against Sherman's Army in the Carolinas and later against raiders common to the area at the close of the war.3

Joseph and Katherine Miller Reed's first son, Samuel Harrison Reed was born May 6, 1851 at the old John Reed homestead on Gashes Creek. He received his early education at the private academy operated by Colonel Stephen Lee in Chunn's Cove of present day Asheville. Samuel Reed began the study of law in 1868, at the age of seventeen, and graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1872.4

Joseph Reed's land purchases added considerably to his Gashes Creek homeplace. He purchased Busbee Mountain and in 1870 "purchased a twelve hundred and sixty acre plantation two miles south of Asheville, on a small portion of which is now located the towns of Biltmore and South Biltmore."5

Joseph Reed began developing his estate in the Biltmore vicinity with ponds, saw mills, carding and grist mills, and a new home for himself. He was the first man in Western North Carolina to house and sell ice, and owned a brickyard and meat market.6 The Biltmore portion of Reed's estate was the site of the first meeting of Buncombe County Court, at the home of Colonel William Davidson, on April 16, 1792.7

When the Western North Carolina Railroad and Asheville and Spartanburg Railroad approached Asheville in 1879 Joseph Reed negotiated a right of way for their junction. He built a brick station at the junction, presented it to the railroads, and added a brick store and hotel to his earlier buildings at the site, creating the village of Best. In 1883 he purchased a large tract to the east of Best, including the present Municipal Golf Course.8

Joseph Reed died on August 22, 1884, and was buried at Gashes Creek Baptist Church, of which he was a founder. Samuel Harrison Reed inherited a large part of his father's estate.

Samuel Reed married Jessie Wingate, daughter of Thomas Wingate and Kate Lunsford Wingate, on June 18, 1873. Nine children were born to this couple, only four of whom, Bonnie, Cora, Maurice, and Wingate, lived beyond infancy.

Junction and Hendersonville Biltmore, but  excepted the to the  south of town, upon which Samuel Reed

Samuel Reed was the senior member of the law firm of Reed and Van Winkle and undoubtedly enjoyed considerable income from his father's estate. He sold a tract to George Washington Vanderbilt in 1888 including one hundred acres on the "south side of the Swannanoa River at the Asheville Road."9 This tract included present hilltop contiguous built his home.

The Buncombe County Register of Deeds office recorded the transfer of over one thousand acres from the Reeds to the Vanderbilts between 1888 and 1899.

Charles Wingate Reed was born to Samuel and Jessie Reed at their house on Woodfin Street. He related that his father built the new house in Biltmore in the summer of 1892 and "I am told we moved in in the fall of that year, when I had reached the ripe old age of four or five months."10

The house was situated at the crest of a knoll which came to be known as Reed Hill. The hill had been totally cleared of vegetation when the house was built, affording an unobstructed panorama from Biltmore Village to the Kenilworth Inn toward Asheville. Early photos of All Souls Episcopal Church in the Village show the Reed house in the distance, likely painted dark colors. Unfortunately, no closer photos remain today.

The house was among the first in Asheville to be built with running water and a bathroom, the water being pumped from the well by a large windmill. A servants' house was erected about one hundred feet behind the kitchen entrance, and still exists.

Samuel Reed's law office, located at No. 3 Library Building evidently prospered, taking as a client the Chimney Rock Company, developer of the Lake Lure resort. Reed was listed in the 1904-05 City Directory as the owner and proprietor of the Oaks Hotel, a large frame hostelry in the village of Victoria, nearer Asheville.

Samuel Harrison Reed died on May 29, 1905. His wife Jessie had died six months earlier, on December 10, 1904. C. Wingate Reed, then twelve years old, inherited the house. He was sent off to prep school by his guardian/ and the house was closed up.11

Wingate Reed didn't return to Asheville for several years. During that time his guardian, in an effort to make the house at least pay its taxes, rented the upstairs and downstairs as two separate apartments. After Wingate finished college he and his wife Annice moved back to the house in Biltmore in 1913. The only Reed ever born in the house was Charles Wingate Reed, Jr. who died at the age of four. Wingate said "my wife and I lived there for less than a year, when I decided it was too much house and land for a young man just starting in life, so I sold the property, about 17 acres at that time, to a developing company."12

John P. and Hepsie B. Feezor became the owners of the house, and sold off many lots around the house, including a separate one for the servants' quarters. They owned the house until 1946, though there is no known record of their tenancy there.

The ownership changed hands rapidly three times until bought by the Stauffer family in 1948. The Stauffers modernized a bathroom downstairs and enclosed the rear second-storey porch during their stay.

The house was owned by K.M. Abbott from 1963 to 1973 and was split up into a number of small apartments. For several years it stood vacant.

When Marguerite Turcot purchased the house in 1973 the Asheville Building Inspections Department had already begun condemnation proceedings. The old house needed extensive wiring and plumbing for a Certificate of Occupancy, and received its first central heating, although only for the first floor. Most windows had to be re-glazed and the inspectors required storm windows for all 62 windows. A slow and methodical restoration began, the house being painted and re-roofed initially.

Mrs. Turcot strives to return the house to its Nineteenth Century grandeur, and although not finished, the house has progressed enough to have been opened as the "Reed House" bed and breakfast inn. It has been detailed in several local newspaper articles and was the feature article in the December, 1987 issue of "The Old House Journal" magazine.

Reed Hill was originally the exclusive landscaped domain of its owners. After Mr. and Mrs. Reed's deaths, however, the hill was carved up by real estate speculators, new concrete roads were built and small houses constructed. The original entrance drive has been lost to time, save small sections in the side yards, adjacent to present Dodge Street and overlooking London Road. The carriage drive crossed beside the house some fifty feet from the front porch.

The house is of typical Queen Anne style, its most distinctive feature being an octagonal turret on the front corner, facing Biltmore Village. The front parlor and master bedroom comprise a five-sided bay projecting from the front, and each side facade also displays a three-sided bay in the middle of the composition.

A deep porch on the first floor extends across the front facade, wrapping around the front bay and extending down the eastern side. It is highlighted by a gable projection over the entrance stairs with a sawn ornament of star and scrollwork in the gable. The porch cornice is heavily molded. Porch columns are lathe-turned and tapered upward, the bottom third being square in profile. The uppermost section is again square, flanked by arched brackets having a recessed center with scroll-sawn piercing.

The house is sheathed in weatherboards having a four-inch reveal, with vertical corner boards at each break in plane. A heavily molded cornice tops the composition, wrapping around the turret between the second-storey windows and turret windows above. Metal flashing curves gracefully up from this cornice to a sill molding beneath the turret windows, again surrounding the turret. A cornice similar to that of the main house roof, but slightly diminished finishes the the turret wall. The turret is capped by an octagonal ogee roof with a large conical metal spike.

The three bays have gables above their outermost wall, each accented by a recessed sunburst design behind a scalloped half circle. Edges of the gables are also finely molded. A fourth, similar scale gable faces rearward over the driveway, but has a small window rather than the decorative composition. Excepting the  four  gables  the fiberglass shingles.roof  is  hipped. It  is  covered with

An engaged porch extends across the rear elevation on the first floor. It has recently been glassed-in by the current owner. A small rear porch on the second storey has also been enclosed.

The house is entered through a large, decorative front door/ having a single deeply beveled glass at the top. The window and a single fielded panel below are trimmed with half-columns and a decorative apron board is applied below the sill board of the glass pane. The high ceiling of the first floor gives a feeling of spaciousness to the entry hall. All interior trim, doors, and floors was crafted of select grade heart pine. The main stairway runs along the right wall to a square landing, then ninety degrees to the left for a shorter run. A closed-stringer design, it has a Chinese Chippendale railing. The entry hall is wainscotted with a chair rail. The fireplace has a paneled heart pine mantle with large brackets and the fire opening is surrounded by decorative relief tiles. Opening through a pair of pocket doors to the left is the parlor, a large room due to the bay at the front. Another fine paneled mantle graces a fireplace in the rear corner of the room, adjoining a door to the sitting room. Like the entry fireplace, it features raised relief tile work and matching hearth, with a decorative cast iron frame around the fire opening which holds a decorative iron cover plate when not in use. The parlor and sitting room have plastered walls with a simple picture molding and cornice molding. Deeply molded window and door frames and a nicely molded baseboard complete the trim.

The sitting room has a fireplace in the southern wall, sharing a chimney with Samuel Reed's library just behind. The sitting room has a simpler paneled mantle with a beveled mirror built above. The library has an exceptional mantle-piece with built-in shelves. At the southeast corner is the downstairs bathroom. Though modernized, it is original to the house. The Reed House was supposedly the first house south of Asheville to be built with the "facilities" indoors.

The rear door enters the hallway from the back porch, and another stairway here runs straight to the upstairs. Less formal than the main stair, this closed-stringer stair has a balustrade of nicely turned newel post and spindles in its original finish. The walls of the rear-hallway and stairwall have wainscotting matching the entry hall.

The spacious kitchen opens off the rear hall, with another door off the rear porch. At the southwest corner a large pantry, now a laundry room, is appended to the porch, opening into the kitchen. The kitchen originally had an open fireplace, and later a wood cookstove. It has modern fixtures and appliances now, but is heated with a wood stove. The kitchen accesses the dining room through a very tall, swinging paneled door. The dining room has a three-sided bay. A door into the hallway has a large glass pane and a non-opening transom above. Enormous glass-fronted cabinets originally were installed in Robert Bingham's home at Bingham Military Academy in Asheville, and were moved here by the present owner. A doorway originally opened from the dining room onto the front porch. A small sewing room was built into this porch space by a previous owner.

At the head of the main stairs is a small polygonal sitting space, directly under the octagonal turret. At the opposite corner is a large bedroom, likely the master bedroom. Behind it, on the eastern side of the house, are two additional bedrooms. Two more bedrooms open to the west. A small bathroom in the southeast corner likely held only a bathtub originally. Ceiling heights on the second floor are lower, but the wood trim and doors are equally well executed as the first floor. Most doors in the house are five-panelled and feature fancy cast-brass hinges, mortised locks, knobs, and covers with intricate scrollwork typical of the finer homes of that era.

From the second floor's rear hall a door opens onto the rear porch. Entry to the large attic and turret room was originally gained through a hatchway, but a previous owner added a crude but functional stairway, paralleling the original rear stairwell. The turret room and most of the attic were not floored until 1973. The ridge-beam and rafter ends show heavy charring from a fire at some point. On one side of the turret room floor a narrow vertical passage leads downward to above the entry hall. From there it opens to an interstice between the existing sewing room wall and the original porch wall, from there into the space under the main stairwell, and thence into the dug-out basement. It thus permits entry into the turret room without going through the house.

The rear yard still has the original servants' cottage, (now a separate tract and not included in this nomination) a few steps away from the back porch. A carriage house stood on the opposite side of the drive and a large wind-powered water pump drew water from the well to supply the house. A surviving portion of the carriage house was crushed by a cherry tree felled in a storm about 1975. The tree had been planted on the site of the well, and its stump marks that location. A narrow gravel drive now circles the house, slightly uphill from the original driveway bed which would now bisect neighboring houses.

The current owner has restored most of the rooms to a turn-of-the-century appearance in keeping with the home's current use as the Reed House bed and breakfast inn. With such careful stewardship some of the Reed House's best years may well lie ahead.10

Samuel Harrison Reed House (1892) 119 Dodge St., Asheville

Imposing Queen Anne-influenced two-story frame house sited atop Reed Hill overlooking Biltmore.    The bouse is weatherboarded, has interior chimneys with recessed stuccoed panels, and features an octagonal turret west of the entrance.   The turret begins atop the one-story porch, continues one level above the massive second-floor cornice, and is topped with a bell roof and finial.    Clipped-cornered bays surmounted by small gables with dramatic sunburst insets project north, west, and a smaller version, east.   Bracketed turned posts support the porch which carries across the principal (north) and east elevations.    There is an abundance of high quality millwork on the interior including a variety of mantels, molded door and window surrounds with corner blocks, and a spindled Chinese Chippendale-like balus­trade on the grand closed stringer stairway. One Queen Anne-type sash lights the stairway. A small saddlebag-plan house behind the build­ing once housed domestic servants.    Unfortunately the Reed property, once thousands of acres, has been subdivided to the point that tract houses impinge on this structure from several directions.

Clyde Reed House) (early 20th century) 1 Rotary Drive, Asheville

In 1938 the Asheville Orthopedic Home was founded on the Clyde Reed Estate after having operated since 1926 as the Crippled Children's Clinic at All Souls Parish House under the auspices of the Asheville Junior League and Rotary Club.   The former Reed House is a large two-story uncoursed stone building for­mally composed of a central three-bay block with tiled hip roof flanked by two flat-roofed single-bay wings.   Three hip-roof dormers reinforce the three-bay division as does the slight projection of the end bays.    Modillion blocks accent the building's cornice.   Entrance is made through a slightly projecting stone basket arch.   Some nice plaster molding remains in the building's entrance hall despite remodel­ing.   As the hospital has grown numerous buildings have been added to the site.

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NRHP Documentation
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Ordinance No. 1743 Designating Property as a Local Historic Property
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