Ellis Street Graded School Historic District

Residential district in Salisbury, North Carolina, built largely between 1867 and 1948 around the 1881 Ellis Street Graded School, a cruciform brick building set in a park-like setting at the end of W. Kerr Street. The school was the town's first graded public school and its oldest surviving public school building, and many of Salisbury's business and civic leaders were educated there. The surrounding streets grew as middle-class housing within walking distance of downtown and along a streetcar line that reached the area in 1907. Developers such as James Moyle, Frank A. Rankin and T.H. Vanderford subdivided former farmland into small lots from the 1900s to the 1920s. The district contains roughly sixty houses, including a long row of Craftsman bungalows with wood-shingle siding on W. Council Street and four matching Tudor Revival houses at W. Liberty and N. Ellis streets. Few modern intrusions remain, and the area is regarded as an intact example of early twentieth-century streetcar-era neighborhood growth.