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(Photograph by Harvey Harrison, CC BY-SA 3.0)
The Newbold-White House is one of the earliest extant buildings in North Carolina. Located two and a half miles southeast of Hertford, the Newbold-White House faces east on the west bank of the Perquimans River, ten miles upriver from the Albemarle Sound. This part of Perquimans County was once the heart of a Quaker settlement. Recent dendrochronology reveals the house was erected around 1730, when Quakers Abraham and Judith Pricklove Sanders owned the property.
The Newbold-White House is a 20 x 40–foot, one-and-a-half-story brick dwelling with a steep, gabled roof and interior chimneys on either end. The river-facing facade is five bays wide with a central door and three gabled dormers; the opposite facade also has a central door but is three bays wide with two gable dormers. Segmental arches top the first-floor windows. The brickwork shows a high degree of skill: the lowest portion of the exterior, below the water table, is coursed in English bond; the walls above are laid up in Flemish bond with glazed headers that provide integral ornamentation. The hall-and-parlor-plan house had two rooms of unequal size. As was typical, the front and rear doors opened into the larger hall, which was the work center and public area of the house; the smaller parlor was more private. A central passage added in the second half of the eighteenth century made the two rooms of equal size.
The Newbold-White House was restored in 1976–1981 by Edwards, Dove, Knight and Associates with Wilbert M. Kemp and Company. The center passage was removed and reconstructed casement windows featured handmade glass imported from Germany. The property itself has been valuable for archaeologists for the information it imparts about the material culture of early English settlements in North Carolina. Evidence suggests there was an earlier dwelling on this tract of land, likely owned by English settler Joseph Scott, who met with Quaker missionary George Fox on the property in 1672 and began a Quaker congregation in the area shortly thereafter, opening his house for meetings as well as hosting the county precinct court and assembly sessions here in the seventeenth century.
The Newbold-White House is managed by the Perquimans County Restoration Association and is open to the public.
References
Bishir, Catherine W., and Michael T. Southern. A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Eastern North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Bishir, Catherine W. North Carolina Architecture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
“Newbold-White House,” Perquimans County, North Carolina. National Register of Historic Places Inventory–Nomination Form, 1971. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C.
“Newbold-White House.” Perquimans County Restoration Association, Inc. Accessed February 26, 2019. http://perquimansrestoration.org/.