John Jamison House

At the time construction of the house began, Jamison was one of the South’s most widely known and respected hotel owners. The Charlotte native owned and managed the Stonewall Hotel in downtown Charlotte, owned the Vance Hotel in Henderson, and held an interest in the Huffine Hotel in Greensboro. He was also a director of the Commercial National Bank and was president of the Bagwell Real Estate Company in Hamlet. 

However, before the house was completed, Jamison was killed in a tragic accident when the automobile he was driving (one of the city’s first automobiles) stalled on the Southern Railway crossing at Newell Road in the path of an oncoming train. Jamison died trying to assist his passengers (including his wife and two of their sons) evacuate the automobile. Everyone else in the car survived. His wife Lucille Price Whitley Jamison (1873-1967) carried on the construction of the house. She and the couple’s five children moved into the newly completed structure in 1913, even before Providence Road was paved. The family owned the home for sixty-three years. The last Jamison to reside in the house – John and Lucille’s youngest child Sarah Lois Jamison – lived there until its 1975 sale to Mutual Savings and Loan Association for use as a company branch office.   

Constructed of rusticated granite – a feature unique in Myers Park – the Jamison House was designed by Charlotte native Louis H. Asbury Sr. (1877-1975), North Carolina’s first native-born professionally trained architect. Asbury studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before returning to his hometown to open his firm in 1908. As the first North Carolina member of the American Institute of Architects, Asbury earned hundreds of commissions in Charlotte and the surrounding counties. His notable body of work includes the Thies Automobile Sales and Service Building, the Mecklenburg County Courthouse, the First National Bank skyscraper on South Tryon Street, the Mount Carmel Baptist Church building, and the Myers Park and Hawthorne Lane Methodist Church buildings, as well as numerous stately homes throughout Charlotte. The Jamison House is essentially a rustic cottage expanded to the scale of a Neoclassical block house. The formality of Asbury’s design for the main approach is offset by the Queen Anne whimsicality of the more private rear elevation.