Harrill-Porter House
(ca. 1894)
The late Victorian styled Harrill-Porter House is one of the few surviving early Dilworth houses dated to the 1890s.
329 E Kingston Ave, Charlotte, NC 28203
Joseph H. Harrill built his Dilworth home in 1894, just four years after that first streetcar suburb of Charlotte was developed by Edward Dilworth Latta and his Charlotte Consolidated Construction Company. As such, the late Victorian style Harrill-Porter House – with its Queen Anne style influences – is one of Dilworth’s last surviving nineteenth-century houses. Harrill worked for A. H. Porter & Son, a shoe store and men’s clothing outlet on West Trade Street in Charlotte. Harrill and his family lived in their Kingston Avenue home until 1897, when they moved closer into Charlotte to reside on West Tenth Street in Fourth Ward.
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Harrill’s employer Augustus Hooten Porter (1847-1914) purchased the house in 1898. Soon thereafter, his son and business associate Augustus C. Porter (1873-1959) moved into the home. The younger Porter and his wife Edna Belle Davis Porter (1875-1952) acquired the house in 1905, and lived there until the 1950s. Both A. C. and Edna Porter were natives of Farmville, Virginia. They were wed in 1892 and moved to Charlotte in 1897. A. C. worked in the shoe business until his retirement in 1946, first for his father, who came to Charlotte in 1897 but returned to Virginia by 1902. A. C. then went to work for the International Shoe Company. The family attended Pritchard Memorial Baptist Church on South Boulevard in Dilworth, where A. C. served as a Deacon and as Superintendent of Sunday Schools. A. C. and Edna had four daughters. Their third daughter (Lorna) was born in the Harrill-Porter House in 1898. Edna died in 1952 in her Kingston Avenue home.
Soon thereafter, A. C. sold the Harrill-Porter House and moved into the Dilworth Road home of one of his daughters, where he resided until his death seven years later. The new owner of the Harrill-Porter House was Robert D. Alexander, president of the Allright Charlotte Company, a parking service company that owned several pay parking lots throughout the city. Alexander lived in the house for only one year before selling it to Richard Kaye, an employee of Ivey’s Department Store. In 1957, Kaye converted the house into two apartments, one upstairs and one downstairs. He sold the residence in 1960 to John and Bessie Carabateas, who converted the house into four apartments. The property continued to be operated as an apartment house until 1981, when it was heavily damaged by fire. The property was purchased soon thereafter and restored to its original state as a single-family residence.