West Warren Street Historic District

Located on the west side of downtown Shelby in Cleveland County, North Carolina, this roughly sixty-acre residential district was developed mostly between about 1885 and 1958. Its oldest surviving house is a late nineteenth-century farmhouse at 403 Whisnant Street, and its streets were laid out in part through the 1918 subdivision of J. F. Ware's tract. Houses span Queen Anne, Craftsman, Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival and Ranch styles. Two Aladdin Company kit houses stand on West Warren Street, and architect-designed residences by Q. E. Herman and V. W. Breeze and Associates are present. The district also includes El Nido, a Mission-style residence of 1921 designed by California architect Aurelia Swanson, and the 1927-28 Graham Elementary School, which was built to a standardized state design. The district is significant for the range of house types and styles it preserves, illustrating how a middle-class neighborhood grew alongside the expansion of Shelby's cotton and textile economy in the early twentieth century.