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I am using Elizabeth Reid Murray's book as my reference and it has three places it says Whitaker's Mill was on Crabtree Creek and its clear it was the one at Wake Forest Road…two of those references says that was its name in the 20th century so perhaps the Bevers map shows an earlier mill Whitaker owned. The spot shown on Bevers is the confluence of the SE and SW prongs of Beaver Dam creek about where the Harris Teeter is at the intersection of Oberlin and Glenwood is today, so that certainly isn't on Crabtree Creek. Here is a passage in an inset that clarifies further:

"The stone dam and mill known in the 20th century as Whitaker's Mill were rebuilt on the site of the Raleigh Powder Mill built by Waterhouse and Bowes to supply ammunition for the Confederacy throughout the Civil War. " pg 469n

Isaac Hunter and Joseph Gales was also earlier owners according to Murray. 

Interestingly the Joel Whitaker house (seen dates ranging from 1875 to 1882) still stands on Hillsborough st today (brick near the corner of Boylan), though I believe Zanoni owns it, and if that is the case I'd consider it endangered…he tore down the Fabius Briggs house after all...aka Jackpot aka Bourbon St pool hall. 

Edited by Jones_
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BTW, I highly recommend the entire Crabtree Jones archaeology report if you are into history. The most interesting thing they found was over 10 cubic feet of discarded glassware and ceramics underneath the house, that was evidently all deposited at once at some point prior to the house's foundation being bricked in at some point in early 20th century.  They can't figure out why, other than when guy who was grandson of Crabtree Jones died in 1915, his widow was 30 years younger than him, and they speculate that she "cleaned house" and got rid of lots of old/mismatched "junk" that now has yielded an archaeological treasure.  But the mystery is, why did she throw it all under the house and brick the foundation up?  Why not just haul off to the dump??

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My guess is there really weren't dumps in 1915...and most likely not a city service to come get stuff, and they were not in the City limits. I know my 1930's apartment building still has a trash chute leading into the coal furnace, and I am definitely inside the 1930's city limits so its possible even that late trash service was not a thing. 

I scanned over that report last night but missed that part. Really good stuff. I am surprised it didn't mention that Wake Forest road used to be about half way up the hill between its current alignment and the old house site....Hillmer Dr may have been on that alignment too....the cemetery is right on it (common practice in those days) and at the end of Hillmer there seemed to be a road cut extending through the property. The north Raleigh Hilton lobby has an extensive exhibit on Isaac Hunter's tavern and the old road alignment and I am projecting that info on down through my observations at the Crabtree Jones site. Interestingly, there is a drive way here on Wake Forest Road with a house back in the woods that seems to conform to the old road alignment though I have not gone back in there to see if it's an old structure or what...

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I don't know exactly but I bet it corresponded to squaring up Six Forks, (which I have heard was dirt up until North Hills was built in 1963). The 1938 aerial looks like it may have been taken shortly after this. Possible WPA project? Could have been even sooner though. The Lotus Villa write up isn't clear on the date the Capital Blvd segment from Watkins Grill to current 401 was graded but it seems like it was around 1900…..the Six Forks/Wake Forest project, being nearby, may have come at a similar time perhaps….I'm basing that on nothing though, but the car was just arriving on the scene and I know by the 1920's road projects were happening nationwide...

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  • 2 years later...

REsurrecting this thread in hopes that my man Jones can identify the old brick structure behind the Reynolds Building (Edenton St. behind the round hotel) visible on Google maps here: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7818291,-78.6438461,195m/data=!3m1!1e3 as connected to the parcel the Reynolds Building sits on.  Carriage house from the grand old house that once stood on the corner of Edenton and Harrington?  Work your Sanborn maps magic!!

 

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Its currently part of the 316 W Edenton St parcel along with that 3 story, circa 1986 Reynolds Building. The 1914 Sanborn shows a wooden car garage on that spot (1 1/2 stories) but it's not clearly associated with 316 W Edenton, though it does sit directly behind it. My best guess is that the current structure was built in the 1930's or 40's and replaced that wooden garage (which was about that size). I am basing this on:

Window casings are from that period, it has four bays that are about the right size for cars, and a couple other Georgian revival commercial buildings from the same period are/were in the area (one just demolished for One Glenwood and the other is that place that does car tops on West Street.  The block itself doesn't have any huge houses in 1914...more middle class type stuff. 

I keep hoping the Reynolds will fix it up but it seems to just keep getting rougher all the time. It would have been a nice sidewalk facing commercial building like all the ones on west Franklin St in Chapel Hill (like 8-10 of them if you keep street viewing around)

Sorry I don't have more definitive info...as you know I am just a hobbyist at this stuff, and don't have regular access to the official records like deeds and archives :(

FWIW I do know of three carriage houses surviving....the Montfort Hall one 1850's(on Mountford Ave, moved slightly from its original spot), the Hawkins carriage house  1870's, moved to save it (or so I read, but don't see it on Sanborn next to either Hawkins House...it's on Lane st between Bloodworth and East), and of course the very large Tucker Carriage House, 1880's or 90's.  Another little oddity, is this shed is second empire architecture and I read it was saved from a demolished estate downtown, but am not sure where. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I've been meaning to do this for years, but here are finally some pictures of the dam, that I am 99% sure the community of Millbrook is named for. The dam is located behind the Raleigh Racquet Club. A small part of the dam was obliterated by a sewer line, but most of it is there. Mortar free and some remains of a road coming in from the Wake Forest Road direction. The spillway is also well defined (pic included) 

Millbrook Dam 1.jpg

Millbrook Dam 2.jpg

Millbrook Dam 2.JPG

Millbrook Dam Spillway.jpg

Edited by Jones_
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  • 3 months later...
  • 1 month later...
On 8/29/2017 at 3:03 PM, Jones_ said:

I've been meaning to do this for years, but here are finally some pictures of the dam, that I am 99% sure the community of Millbrook is named for. The dam is located behind the Raleigh Racquet Club. A small part of the dam was obliterated by a sewer line, but most of it is there. Mortar free and some remains of a road coming in from the Wake Forest Road direction. The spillway is also well defined (pic included) 

Millbrook Dam 1.jpg

Millbrook Dam 2.jpg

Millbrook Dam 2.JPG

Millbrook Dam Spillway.jpg

so you think the mill site was accessed from the EAST (old route of Wake Forest Road that dead ends into Atlantic Ave.) rather than the west (Falls of Neuse)?  If you look at Google, this stream (Marsh Creek) flows southeast just to the north of the center of what used to be Millbrook.  On a related note, was there once a train depot at Millbrook?  Anyone ever seen a pic?

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The road cut back there seems to head towards Wake Forest Road. The closest community being Millbrook, and there being a train depot right off the bat in the 1850's (according to Elizabeth Reid Murray I think), makes it even more likely the mill sent its good in that direction. Obviously this is just my best guess. There was a small wooden white and green building in the SW corner of the tracks and Millbrook road until about 2000-2002 or so. I kept meaning to get a picture thinking it was a loading platform at a minimum, but then one day, poof, it was gone.  It had that 1900-1920 look to it...not fancy at all...anyway I didn't get a good feel for if it was THE station, part of a station complex, or not really related at all, since no siding was existent. Millbrook only had like 150 residents before it was no longer identifiable as a community so any station would not have been big, leaving open the possibility that what I had seen was THE station in that time period. 

Mike Legeros has compiled some stuff about the community you'll find interesting. 

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  • 1 year later...

I've long thought news places come on here for ideas for articles. RE the mill site, I haven't been out there in a couple of years but addendums to their article from my memory...it looks like the dam started out as a shorter earthen (and probably wood) dam that was raised with the stone later. It looked like this mill used a millrace and the top of this dam to send water to the wheel and once it hit the wheel was back in the creek. My guess is it was an undershot wheel. This creek doesn't seem  deep enough to send the water over a wheel from the top of the dam. The Fendol Bevers map of 1871 clearly names that branch of Marsh Creek "Mill Brook" and yet there is no millpond on it. There are dozens of millponds on the map so either he didn't draw it in because its implicit in the name or by 1871 the pond was empty. The arrival of the railroad stop in Millbrook about 15 years earlier might have made it cheaper to send stuff to nearby larger, more efficient mills like on Crabtree Creek. The Bevers map doesn't even show a small farm road heading down to the site (hashed line roads if you look at the map). It may have gone idle during the Civil War too and never brought back into use. If it went idle in the 1850's or 60's the grindstones are possibly still on site somewhere, buried in the duff. They may have also been carried off to another mill. The timbers would have rotted away long ago. The parking lot of the Catholic Church on Falls of Neuse has the cemetery associated with a house that apparently was Federal style in appearance (can't find that paper now, but this was written in the 1970's trying to document rapidly disappearing stuff in the County). It is the closest house I am aware of that could have been associated with that mill and would correlate with the oldest dates for the mill in the article. 

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  • 2 years later...
On 4/15/2015 at 9:15 PM, Jones_ said:

I am using Elizabeth Reid Murray's book as my reference and it has three places it says Whitaker's Mill was on Crabtree Creek and its clear it was the one at Wake Forest Road…two of those references says that was its name in the 20th century so perhaps the Bevers map shows an earlier mill Whitaker owned. The spot shown on Bevers is the confluence of the SE and SW prongs of Beaver Dam creek about where the Harris Teeter is at the intersection of Oberlin and Glenwood is today, so that certainly isn't on Crabtree Creek. Here is a passage in an inset that clarifies further:

"The stone dam and mill known in the 20th century as Whitaker's Mill were rebuilt on the site of the Raleigh Powder Mill built by Waterhouse and Bowes to supply ammunition for the Confederacy throughout the Civil War. " pg 469n

Isaac Hunter and Joseph Gales was also earlier owners according to Murray. 

Interestingly the Joel Whitaker house (seen dates ranging from 1875 to 1882) still stands on Hillsborough st today (brick near the corner of Boylan), though I believe Zanoni owns it, and if that is the case I'd consider it endangered…he tore down the Fabius Briggs house after all...aka Jackpot aka Bourbon St pool hall. 

I'm currently studying this mill site... the Powder Mill.  I believe that most evidence of it has been obliterated by Wake Forest Rd and some parking lots?  Also, there is some confusion in my head anyway, on the old maps.  The Powder Mill seems to shift around and cross the creek and etc.  Today, I walked down there.  I believe the remain of a dam are visible right on the Northeast side of the Wake Forest Rd bridge.  And there is a pool of some sort built on that side that may date to the 1860's, though it definitely has modern renovations as well.  All the pieces don't fit yet, but I'll post some stuff on the "you know you grew up in raleigh" facebook group.  [email protected] 

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On 4/27/2022 at 4:21 PM, charles uzzell said:

I'm currently studying this mill site... the Powder Mill.  I believe that most evidence of it has been obliterated by Wake Forest Rd and some parking lots?  Also, there is some confusion in my head anyway, on the old maps.  The Powder Mill seems to shift around and cross the creek and etc.  Today, I walked down there.  I believe the remain of a dam are visible right on the Northeast side of the Wake Forest Rd bridge.  And there is a pool of some sort built on that side that may date to the 1860's, though it definitely has modern renovations as well.  All the pieces don't fit yet, but I'll post some stuff on the "you know you grew up in raleigh" facebook group.  [email protected] 

Both sides of Wake Forest, north side, are landfill. If the mill site was on the north side its long gone under that. Also we know Wake Forest road used to be a couple hundred yards further west at the North Raleigh Hilton site (also the site of Isaac Hunters Tavern). The old site of Crabtree Jones house had a deep road bed extending between the dead end of Hillmer Drive and the driveway of the Jones house. This also coincides exactly with the western track of the old Wake Forest Road just north of here. Taken together it seems like the original crossing of the road over Crabtree Creek also would have been another hundred feet west or so. Murray's book has a photo of the mill dam that shows a wooden bridge passing over (but not *on) the damn. That suggests the dam itself would have been a hundred feet west as well. None of this area has much elevation drop so there must have been a very long mill race from upstream or an earthen embankment must have extended very far to each side (like the Millbrook dam, which still exists but is clearly smaller). I have also walked around under the bridge a few times and there are some old bricks among the rocks...they are weathered but its still hard to say if they were mill related or not. I am familiar with that little pool and think its a modern scour from all the parking lot runoff north of there but I can't be certain. The best chance of siting it with certainty would be aerial soil survey photos from the 30's (beginning of water and soil conservation districts) since the landfill was done in the 50's. I never got around to finding a source for those...the City used to have some posted 25 years ago but they were taken down. Its possible State Archives has them. 

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 4/29/2022 at 10:52 PM, Jones_ said:

The best chance of siting it with certainty would be aerial soil survey photos from the 30's (beginning of water and soil conservation districts) since the landfill was done in the 50's. I never got around to finding a source for those...the City used to have some posted 25 years ago but they were taken down. Its possible State Archives has them. 

 

Would the 1938 aerials have what you need?  These seem to be the images that might contain the area you mention

13-210, 13-212, 14-17, 14-19 (edit: 13-214 might have closest coverage)

https://library.unc.edu/data/gis-usda/wake/1938

 

Edited by Poo Diddy
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  • 2 weeks later...
On 5/24/2022 at 10:21 AM, Poo Diddy said:

 

Would the 1938 aerials have what you need?  These seem to be the images that might contain the area you mention

13-210, 13-212, 14-17, 14-19 (edit: 13-214 might have closest coverage)

https://library.unc.edu/data/gis-usda/wake/1938

 

Ah, thanks! 13-210 does provide some insight...so by 1938 a concrete paved US 1 is clearly realigned about 30-60 feet east of the old alignment...you can see the old alignment headed northwest of the McNeil intersection before becoming parallel with the concrete part. This has always been my assumption based on stuff I've read about the alignment up by the north Raleigh Hilton and an old road bed that used to extend north from Hillmer Drive directly in front of the old Crabtree Jones house (the Cemetery is still on Hillmer Drive if interested) I should have known US 1 would have been paved by then. So the one photo I have seen of the mill shows it exactly adjacent and NE of the road crossing over the dam. So it seems like that mill site is now directly under the road itself. :/ I'll look at the other photos later a little closer to see if anything else looks interesting. Edit: Re your Edit, 13-214 has Millbrook village in the bottom right...the whole map is a tad north of crabtree creek. 

Edited by Jones_
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