Old Wilson Historic District

Old Wilson Historic District covers a group of five adjoining neighborhoods in the northeastern part of Wilson, North Carolina: Maplewood, Woodard Circle, Whitehead Place, College Place and Rountree Place. While the city's wealthiest families settled along West Nash Street, this area housed merchants, clerks, shopkeepers and other middle-class and working people. Its buildings range from impressive Queen Anne houses on Woodard Circle to modest frame dwellings near Atlantic Christian College. The district includes a few mid-nineteenth-century Italianate and Gothic Revival houses, late Victorian cottages, turn-of-the-century Queen Anne residences, gable-front rental houses, Colonial Revival homes and one of the finest collections of bungalows in North Carolina. Four brick apartment buildings, brick churches and small neighborhood groceries also stand here. Houses were frame until the 1910s, when brick came into use. Mature hardwood street trees, mostly oaks, shade the flat terrain and tie the neighborhoods together. The area was listed for its architectural variety and its record of the city's residential growth.