Smith, William G., House

Standing at the head of a gravel road in Granville County, the William G. Smith House is a two-story central block flanked by one-story wings, a plan the nomination calls the only true tripartite dwelling in the county. The house was probably raised in the quarter century before 1816, the year of the death of its first known owner, William G. Smith, a planter who bought 23 tracts of land between 1760 and 1815. Much of the Georgian and transitional Georgian/Federal interior survives, including raised-panel doors, a boxed stair, original three-part surrounds and wainscoting in the hall. Its exterior resembles a small group of houses built in North Carolina's border tobacco counties around 1790 to 1810. The property is significant for its architecture and its link to the county's plantation era, which ended in 1865. An unusually tall mortise-and-tenon smokehouse survives at the rear of the lot.