E. B. Gresham House
(ca. 1925)
The uniquely styled stone bungalow built for E. B. and Nettle Gresham has been attributed to the prominent Charlotte-born architect Louis B. Asbury.
4724 Edgehill Rd N, Charlotte, NC 28207
The E. B. Gresham house in Myers Park is one of the more unusual houses of its style in Charlotte. Built for Edwin Beverly Gresham (1878-1968) and his wife Nettle Dowd Gresham (1880-1945) between 1924 and 1925, its setting overlooking Edgehill Park reflects a comfortable style of 1920s suburban living, while the unique architectural features of its granite stonework and imitation thatched roof suggest owners wanting to combine solidity in a contemporary home with a taste for the out-of-the-ordinary.
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E. B. Gresham, a Virginia native who graduated from Wake Forest University, married Nettle Dowd – the daughter of Captain J. C. and Henrietta Rives Dowd of Charlotte – in October 1899, when he was twenty-two and she nineteen. By the early 1920s, E. B. had become a department manager for the J. B. Ivey Company. The couple and their son E. B. Jr., who was studying for a career in law, lived on East Boulevard in Dilworth until about 1924, when they temporarily took up residence in Myers Park. E. B. purchased the Edgehill Road property in 1924 for $6,500, and hired Charlotte’s Thies-Smith Realty Company to construct the seven-room house for an estimated $15,000. Evidence suggests that Charlotte native Louis B. Asbury Sr. (1877-1975) designed the bungalow styled house. As North Carolina’s first native-born professionally trained architect to practice in his home state, Asbury designed several notable structures over the years, including the First National Bank skyscraper, Mayfair Manor (now Dunhill Hotel), the Mecklenburg County Courthouse, and the Myers Park and Hawthorne Lane Methodist Churches.
As the Gresham House was being built in 1925, E. B. went into business for himself, opening a cafe on Statesville Avenue. Four years later, in November 1929, the Greshams sold their stone bungalow to George B. and Lily Wray Cabaniss, and moved to Greensboro, where Mr. Gresham again went into the restaurant business. George Cabaniss (1866-1937) and his wife Lily (d. 1940), who had a women’s clothing business on West Trade Street, used the house as a rental property between 1929 and 1937. They then gave the house to their daughter Martha (1909-1977) in celebration of her marriage to Ernest F. Young, Jr. (1904-1975), the head of Davis and Young, an insurance firm that he co-founded. The newlyweds lived in the house for the remainder of their lives, raising two sons in the process. Kwan Pang Lau, a native of mainland China working as an engineer for Duke Power Company, purchased the house following Martha’s 1977 death. He and his wife Myra Clontz Lau, a native Carolinian, carefully reconditioned the house to restore and preserve its notable features.