Apex Historic District (Boundary Increase)

Frame houses and a church on a compact grid of streets east of the railroad tracks in Apex, Wake County, form this boundary increase to the Apex Historic District. The Apex Land and Improvement Company platted the land in 1906, and over the next decade families built Queen Anne and Neoclassical Revival houses with pyramidal roofs, bay windows, dormers and wraparound porches. Prominent figures included banker J. R. Cunningham, whose 1906 house on S. Hughes Street is described as the first of the newer type of residential architecture in town, and merchant J. W. Lassiter, whose Queen Anne cottage has a corner turret. The oldest building is the ca. 1870 Italianate Thompson-Wrenn House at 203 E. Chatham Street. The 1917 Gothic Revival Apex United Methodist Church stands on the block beside the tracks. The area was included because it holds the densest concentration of historic buildings in this part of town, and it is said to show the town's early twentieth-century prosperity.