Myrtle Lawn

Myrtle Lawn is a plantation complex on twelve acres near Enfield in Halifax County, North Carolina. Its main building is a two-story weatherboarded frame house, five bays wide and two rooms deep, begun about 1816 by Absalom Benton Whitaker and enlarged by two bays in the 1840s or 1850s. The expansion deliberately kept the Federal character of the older section, so the two phases are hard to distinguish from outside, apart from the ornate sawnwork porch. Around the house stand a carriage house, a temple-form plantation office, a dairy, a log vegetable storage house set directly on the ground, storage buildings and the ruin of a slave house. Several use wooden foundation blocks or earthfast methods that persisted well into the nineteenth century. Members of the Whitaker family owned the property for nearly 150 years. The complex is notable for its completeness, its range of building types and its record of plantation life before and after the Civil War.