Mill Avenue Historic District

Laid out circa 1890 on land Richard Ward sold to the Onslow Land and Improvement Company, the Mill Avenue neighborhood lies beside the tracks of the Wilmington, Onslow and East Carolina Railroad in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Its roughly fifty-nine buildings and sites are mostly frame houses, including single-pile center-hall cottages from the early 1890s, larger side-hall houses built after 1901, and bungalows from the 1920s. The district is significant for its ties to the railroad and lumber boom of the 1890s, when a mill operated on the New River nearby. It also reflects Richard Ward, a physician, businessman and developer who lived there in a Late Victorian house. The Jarman Hotel, a rambling frame railroad hotel of about 1890, and the brick Jacksonville Depot give the neighborhood its transportation character. The period of significance ends in 1941, when Camp Lejeune transformed the town.