Fuquay Springs Historic District (Boundary Increase)

Fuquay Springs Historic District occupies about five blocks of Fuquay-Varina, a small town in southern Wake County, and is built around the Fuquay Mineral Spring. The spring drew visitors for health and recreation from the late nineteenth century into the 1920s, and its hotels, boarding houses and pavilion shaped the residential streets that grew up beside it. The district is composed mostly of one- and two-story frame and brick houses built between about 1899 and 1946, when tobacco was becoming the town's main industry. Notable buildings include the Varina Mercantile Building of 1899, the only commercial building in the district, and the Ben-Wiley Hotel, built in 1925 as a Craftsman-style hotel near the spring. Several houses display Colonial Revival and Craftsman features such as pedimented entries, exposed rafter ends and porches with tapered posts on brick piers. The district is significant for its link to the spring resort era and for its cohesive early twentieth-century residential character.