Allison Woods

Allison Woods is a gentleman's farm and rural retreat of about 298 acres northeast of Statesville, North Carolina, on the South Yadkin River. William Locke Allison, a former railroad engineer and Baldwin Locomotive Works vice-president, developed it between about 1926 and 1939 on land held by his family since the late eighteenth century. The property centres on two man-made lakes, the upper lake formed by impounding an old tannery spring and the lower lake completed in the early 1930s. Stone buildings by local mason Baldy Franklin Guy include a springhouse, a mill house, and an ice and party house, and a brick bungalow built in 1928-1929 by Statesville contractor L. Boyer Tomlinson housed the farm manager. The estate also had an orchard of about twenty acres, cultivated fields, and a herd of livestock. It is valued as one of very few surviving interwar gentleman's farms of its kind in North Carolina, and its buildings and landscape retain much of their original character.