Claremont High School Historic District

Northeast of downtown Hickory, this fifty-acre neighborhood centers on Claremont High School and spreads along Third, Fourth and Fifth Avenues, parts of Second Avenue and North Center Street, and Carolina Park. Sixty-two buildings show how the city grew from a small town in the late nineteenth century into a manufacturing center. The oldest notable building is an 1875 Italianate farmhouse at the northern edge. The 1887 Shuler-Harper house is described as the finest surviving Queen Anne building in Hickory, with Eastlake interior detail. Later houses move through Colonial Revival, including the square-house type, then bungalows and Tudor Revival designs. Residents ranged from bankers, lawyers and doctors to farmers and ticket agents. Brick became the dominant material after 1923. The school site recalls Claremont Female College, which occupied a Second Empire building there from 1883. Carolina Park, bought by the city in 1904, was long known for its mineral spring.