Williamston Commercial Historic District

Williamston's downtown business district lies along Main Street, with Washington Street and two shorter cross streets, in the northern coastal plain of North Carolina. Its roughly forty-three resources are mostly brick one- to three-story commercial buildings, many of them with corbeled brickwork on their upper facades and rows of arched second-story windows. The oldest buildings are two frame offices from about 1850, one of which, the Docton W. Bagley Building, has a pedimented Greek Revival front with fluted pilasters. Two Colonial Revival buildings with stone veneer, the former People's Bank and the Tar Heel Apartments, are dated 1917 and 1920 respectively. The district developed as a trading center after the Atlantic Coast Line route reached the town in 1882, when rail freight replaced river steamers as the main link to outside markets. Its range of styles, from Greek Revival to Art Deco and International, is unusually broad for a town of this size.