Lawrence, John P., Plantation

Set on a rise behind a grove of trees near Grissom, this former plantation seat in Granville County covers about 8.5 acres. The two-story, T-plan timber frame house, probably built in the 1840s by planter John P. Lawrence and his wife Frances, sits over a brick-walled basement and keeps its original porches, fluted corner posts and low hipped roofs. Inside, the stair hall and one upstairs bedroom display marbleized woodwork, and the downstairs rooms retain fluted surrounds, two-panel doors and post and lintel mantels. Behind the house stand an antebellum kitchen and smokehouse, a gambrel-roofed stable and a corn crib from the bright leaf tobacco era. In front is a one-room private schoolhouse from the late nineteenth century. The property is regarded as the best-preserved former plantation seat in the county and as a record of planter and tobacco-farming life. It has never left the Lawrence family, and its period of significance runs from the 1840s to 1937.