Bryan-Bell Farm

Pollocksville's western approaches hold the Bryan-Bell Farm, a 2251-acre tract of woodland and cultivated fields along NC 58 in Jones County. The plantation core was established by James C. Bryan, who bought the land in 1844 and probably built the two-and-a-half-story frame house in the early 1840s in the Late Federal style. In 1920, Joseph Hiram Bell's son Edward Earl Bell had the house remodelled in the Neo-Classical Revival style, adding a monumental four-column Corinthian portico. The property is regarded as a rare surviving intact nineteenth-century plantation in the county. Its landscape of fields divided by drainage ditches, and its outbuildings from the 1840s through the 1940s, document changes in land use from the antebellum period through tenant farming and mid-twentieth-century livestock raising. The house interior also keeps Late Federal mantels and mahogany-grained transom elements. The farm's enslaved workforce, owned by the Bryans, is documented in census records.