LaGrange Historic District

LaGrange is a small railroad town in western Lenoir County, in North Carolina's flat, largely agricultural coastal plain. Its historic district is organized around the east-west railroad tracks and the crossing of Railroad and Caswell Streets. The district takes in parts of twenty-five blocks laid out on a regular grid, with 306 resources, about three-quarters of them contributing. Houses range from mid-nineteenth-century Greek Revival cottages to mid-twentieth-century ranch houses, and Queen Anne designs predominate. Notable examples include the 1887 Colonel A. C. Davis House and the c. 1898 Sutton-Kinsey House. The 100 block of South Caswell Street forms a compact business district of mostly 1910s red-brick buildings, anchored by the 1908 Neoclassical Revival Rouse Banking Company Building. At the west end stand the 1928 Colonial Revival LaGrange Elementary School and the Hardy-Newsome Industrial Complex, whose early twentieth-century brick buildings have stepped-parapet gables. The district is listed for its coherent record of the town's development from the 1850s railroad era through 1949.