Mordecai Place Historic District

Northeast of downtown Raleigh, this district covers roughly fifteen blocks of small-lot streets lined with frame and brick houses built between about 1916 and 1947. It has 181 contributing buildings and one contributing object, about three quarters of its resources. Craftsman bungalows are the most common type, alongside Cape Cods, Foursquares, I-houses and revival styles including Georgian, Colonial, Tudor, Dutch Colonial, Spanish Mission and Italian Renaissance. The largest houses stand near the Mordecai House, a plantation house of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that now operates as a museum within Mordecai Historic Park. Most of the neighborhood grew after the plantation lands were subdivided in 1922, and the district also keeps the 1924 Barbee School and Pilot Baptist Church, remnants of the Pilot Mill village. Large oaks, dense tree cover and carefully tended gardens give the area a character recalling the 1920s, its main growth period, and show how neighborhoods looked before modern suburban tract development.