Mount Gilead Downtown Historic District

Mount Gilead's downtown is a compact grid of brick commercial buildings along North and South Main Streets and West Allenton Street in Montgomery County, North Carolina. Of its twenty-nine buildings, most are stores, with a Town Hall in a former theater, a library in the former post office, and the First United Methodist Church, built in 1910 to a Romanesque and Gothic design by Will Haywood. Storefronts keep recessed entrances, patterned-glass transoms and pressed metal cornices, and the repeated corbelled brickwork suggests a single builder may have worked on much of the district. The town grew after roads and, in the 1890s, a railroad arrived, becoming a regional market for produce and building materials from local lumber, brick, stone and slate industries. The district was recognized for that commercial role and for its well-preserved early twentieth-century architecture. Its period of significance runs from 1900 to 1955, when the former Gilmont theater became the town hall.