Villa Place Historic District (Boundary Increase)

Added to an existing historic district, this roughly 31-acre neighborhood lies west of downtown Rocky Mount and completes the 1913 Villa Place subdivision along with part of an earlier 1907 plat. Of its 188 resources, 151 contribute to its character. Most are frame houses and garages on fifty-foot lots, with sidewalks, alleys and mature shade trees. Bungalows and other Arts and Crafts houses dominate, built for ticket agents, bookkeepers, merchants and salesmen, alongside pyramidal cottages, Foursquares, and a block of five well-preserved mill houses once tied to a hosiery company. Later additions include Period Cottages with Colonial or Tudor touches from the 1930s and 1940s, an Art Moderne apartment building from about 1945, and two corner groceries. Brick Ranch houses of the 1950s are noncontributing because they postdate the period of significance. The district is valued for community development and for its intact collection of early twentieth-century residential architecture, dated roughly from 1907 to 1950.