Glen Royall Mill Village Historic District

Built from 1900 onward beside the Royall Cotton Mill in Wake Forest, North Carolina, this roughly 45-acre residential district was laid out on a simple grid of streets to house mill operatives and their families. Contractor Benjamin Thomas Hicks erected the first houses under plans attributed to mill superintendent John D. Briggs, and by 1927 the village held about eighty-nine houses. The most common types are one-story frame pyramidal-roofed cottages and triple-A cottages, along with shotgun houses, many with weatherboard siding and brick piers. The village is significant as a relatively intact example of early twentieth-century cotton mill housing, a form tied to the rapid growth of the state's textile industry after 1900. The district also contains a church, stores, the mill commissary and the Queen Anne-Colonial Revival Powell-White House, the largest and most refined house in the village. The village was annexed by Wake Forest in 1977 after the mill closed in 1976.