Mount Olive Historic District

Mount Olive grew up along a railroad line surveyed and built through the area in 1838-39, which gave the town its southwest-northeast street axis along Center Street. The district covers roughly 200 acres and includes 468 contributing historic resources dating from the late antebellum period to 1949, most of them houses, with commercial buildings, churches, schools and industrial plants also present. Its brick commercial row was built largely after a fire in 1898 prompted a policy of brick construction. Truck farming, especially strawberries, drove growth at the turn of the twentieth century, and the town's population rose from 393 in 1890 to 2,297 in 1920. The district is valued for its range of building types and styles, its intact commercial core, and its record of the town's rail-based and agricultural economy, and it is recognized at the local level of significance.