Pearl Mill Village Historic District

Pearl Mill Village is a compact group of twenty-six mill houses on the 900 blocks of Orient and Washington Streets in Durham. Twenty-two are two-story, one-room-deep frame duplexes built around 1905, with gable roofs that extend over a tall rear shed. Four are one-story bungalows built by the mill around 1924. The houses sit in uniform rows with shallow front yards, on a hillside set apart by a ravine, a railroad line and busy streets. Pearl Cotton Mills was founded in 1892 by Brodie L. Duke and came under Erwin Cotton Mills control, closing in 1968. Of roughly sixty company houses in four clusters, this is the largest surviving group, and the mill itself is gone. The mill sold the houses to private owners in 1945, and later changes include replaced porch floors and posts, new siding and some altered doors, yet the district still reads as a mill village. Its significance rests on its link to Durham's textile industry and its intact house types.