Kenworth Historic District

Kenworth Historic District is a compact neighborhood of twenty-three main buildings on roughly nine acres in southeast Hickory. It occupies the northwest corner of the original Kenworth subdivision, the city's first, and was built almost entirely between about 1920 and 1926. Fifth Street, entered between paired stone piers off Second Avenue, is its principal street. About seventy percent of the buildings are bungalows, and the group is described as the most varied and impressive collection of the type in Hickory. The houses share similar setbacks, lot sizes, gabled porches, exposed purlin brackets, tapered porch posts and stone or brick foundations suited to the sloping terrain. Other buildings include three Colonial Revival houses, the 1913 Kenworth Elementary School, and the 1926 Neo-Gothic former Christ Lutheran Church, now Mount Zion Baptist Church. The district was listed because its buildings form a cohesive, intact group that contrasts with the newer development around it.