Bracebridge Hall (Boundary Increase)

Bracebridge Hall is a plantation seat in south central Edgecombe County, about ten miles south of Tarboro, surrounded by flat fields and woodland. The two-story weatherboarded house began around 1830-1832 as a small Federal-style dwelling built by Jonas and Elizabeth Jane Carr, who named it after Washington Irving's novel. In the later 1830s Jonas Carr added a five-bay Greek Revival block with a Doric portico, its details taken from Asher Benjamin's pattern books. His son Elias Carr, later North Carolina's governor, raised the older ell to two stories around 1880-1881 and added a brick kitchen ell in 1885. The original 1970 listing covered only four acres and the house. The boundary increase brings in about 149.71 acres, including the grounds, a plantation office, servants' house, brick ruins of a dairy, ash house and ice house, barns, an overseer's house, thirteen fields and the Carr Cemetery, where seven generations of the family are buried. Eleven of the twenty-two resources contribute.