Royster House, Raleigh Street, Oxford, North Carolina
Spring cleaning and organizing. It is on and I'm in it to win it. My family is now immune to my demanding to know, "Why do we have...." so often. Board games. Why do we have so many board games no one plays and feel such a societal obligation to keep them? Someone tell me it's ok to part with Don't Break the Ice.
I took a break from them and my mismatched food storage lids to admire this house. It's a 1901 Colonial Revival in Oxford, North Carolina.
It has a tower and historical photos!
But, like my house, this house needs a little attention:
Really quickly, before we go in, just let me do one thing:
I feel better now. On with the tour!
I felt compelled to match the listing photos with the floor plan. Maybe I should keep my board games.
But now we know, this is the parlor with the bay:
The dining room and kitchen:
The sitting room:
The bedroom:
And the nursery:
I love knowing that this was a nursery. I imagine it looked a tiny bit like this back in the day:
{source unknown}
Continuing with the downstairs match game tour, here are the rear hall and rear porch:
Upstairs are 4 more bedrooms and one bathroom (there are 3.5 in total now, which explains why I can't match all the rooms on the old floor plan). The house is 5,353 square feet.
As it said on the old photo at the top, the house was built for General Beverly Sampson Royster, which means the nursery probably housed little Beverly, Jr. and his brother Royall. The house cost about $7,800 to build, which a nice Old House Dreams commenter mentions is equivalent to $243,297.60 today.
"Standing well back on its lot at the head of Front St., this Chateauesque/Colonial Revival house was that of a prominent attorney and mason." (Judging by that build cost, I'd say he was prominent, all right.) "The porch originally wrapped around the house, according to a photograph found in Southern Colonial Homes, a book of Raleigh architect Charles W. Barrett's work." {source-- Royster House is #8 on the historic walking tour.}
Last but not least, I came across two fairly recent photos that show furnished rooms:
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I tried to click through on that first source, but it jumped through a lot of web addresses (spam links?) and eventually told me that my Adobe flash player is out of date. Of course it is-- it's one more thing I need to organize. "Why do we have flash players that haven't been updated?" Back to work.
The Old House Dreams listing is here.
