Montrose

Montrose is a sixty-one acre estate on the Eno River at the eastern edge of Hillsborough, a county seat in Orange County, North Carolina. Its grounds include a main house whose core was built about 1900 for John Washington Graham and remodeled in 1948 by Durham architect George Watts Carr in the Colonial Revival style, along with a law office used by Governor William Alexander Graham, a smokehouse believed to date from the 1820s and 1830s, a barn, and a kitchen. The property is significant for its long association with three generations of the Graham family, who held political office at the state and national level from 1842 to 1977. Its 1850s landscape, including a geometric kitchen garden attributed to landscape gardener Thomas Paxton, is among the few North Carolina gardens known to retain mid-nineteenth century features. The period of significance runs from 1842 to 1951.