{"nrhp_refnum":"86003388","name":"North Washington Avenue Workers' House","other_names":[],"category":"building","location":{"address":"E side of 300 blk. of N. Washington Ave.","address_restricted":false,"city":"Reidsville","county":"Rockingham County","state":"NC","lat":36.365302417000066,"lon":-79.67109880199996,"geom_source":"nps_gis"},"listed_date":"1986-12-11","is_nhl":false,"nhl_designated_date":null,"areas_of_significance":["Industry","Black","Architecture"],"significance_levels":["local"],"summary":{"what_it_is":"A row of five simple frame workers' houses on the east side of the 300 block of North Washington Avenue (321-329) in Reidsville, Rockingham County, North Carolina, built about 1917 (the text also suggests about 1915) as rental housing for black tobacco workers.","why_significant":"They are described as the only surviving intact group of a house type built in the early twentieth century for black workers at the American Tobacco Company plant. They illustrate the wider pattern of inexpensive housing built for industrial workers who left farming. They are also urban examples of rural folk house forms such as the single-pen house.","narrative":"Five small frame houses on North Washington Avenue in Reidsville preserve a nearly vanished type of worker housing. Built around 1915 to 1917 as rental homes, they served black employees of the American Tobacco Company, whose large plant opened in Reidsville in 1912. Each house began with three rooms, one over one with a shed room behind, giving a saltbox profile, and each has a shed-roofed front porch, weatherboard siding, a standing seam metal roof and a central brick chimney. Their form echoes the single-pen houses common in rural North Carolina, familiar to workers who had left farms for town. A local pharmacist bought the land and had them built as an investment; the first rent was $1.50 a week. Other clusters surveyed in 1978 have been demolished, and two of these seven houses are also gone. The surviving five, with their original spacing, slope and mature trees, show how industrial workers lived in the early twentieth century.","period_of_significance":"ca. 1917","architect_builder":"Unknown","architectural_style":"Simple frame saltbox-form houses derived from rural single-pen folk house types","criteria":["A","C"],"status_note":"Occupied rental houses in good condition, with modern conveniences added and repairs and repainting done by the current owners; most current tenants are retired.","vacant_flag":false,"machine_generated":true,"model":"claude-sonnet-5-5","prompt_version":"v1.0-2026-10-29","generated_at":"2026-10-29 02:57:50.007487-05","source_pdf":"https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/opastorage/live/74/7183/47718374/content/electronic-records/rg-079/NPS_NC/86003388.pdf"},"photo":{"url_800":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/media/86003388/62633e42ed-800.webp","url_1600":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/media/86003388/62633e42ed-1600.webp","licence":"Public domain","author":"Nyttend","credit_html":"<a href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:North_Washington_Avenue_Workers%27_Houses.jpg\" rel=\"noopener\">Nyttend</a>, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons","source_page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:North_Washington_Avenue_Workers%27_Houses.jpg"},"district":null,"sources":{"nps_snapshot_date":"2026-05-22","nara_catalog":"https://catalog.archives.gov/id/47718374","wikipedia":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Washington_Avenue_Workers%27_House","wikidata":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q19987341"},"indexable":true,"url":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/north-carolina/rockingham-county/north-washington-avenue-workers-house-86003388/"}