Lucian H. Walker House
(ca. 1894)
The Lucian H. Walker House is one of Dilworth’s oldest homes.
328 E Park Ave, Charlotte, NC 28203
The Lucian H. Walker House is one of the oldest homes in Dilworth, Charlotte’s first streetcar suburb, and exhibits several architectural features, especially its overall form and massing, that are unique among the extant pre-1900 houses in that neighborhood. The house was built for Lucian Holmes Walker (1859-ca. 1920) and his wife Annie Stuart Walker (1857-1922) in 1894. Design of the uniquely styled “Modern American” house has been attributed to Charlotte architect Charles Christian Hook (1870-1938), who is credited with introducing the Colonial Revival style into Charlotte’s built environment. His work includes some of the city’s most important architectural heritage.
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Lucian worked as a bookkeeper for the Mecklenburg Iron Works when he and Annie contracted with the Charlotte Consolidated Construction Company (known as the 4 C’s) – founded by Edward Dilworth Latta (1851-1925) – to build a new house for his family in Dilworth. By 1899, it appears that the Walkers were no longer living in Dilworth, but rather at 913 South Tryon Street. As of 1902, the Walkers were in residence on East Avenue, with Lucian then working as a teller at the Charlotte National Bank and Annie serving as the principal of the Primary Department of the Presbyterian College for Women (a forerunner of Queens College that was built on College Street in 1900). As of the following year, the Walkers no longer appeared in the Charlotte City Directories, suggesting they had moved out of town. The 1910 U.S. Census shows the Walkers living in Roanoke, Virginia.
A graduate of St. Louis’ Washington University, Hook moved to Charlotte in 1891 to teach mechanical drawing in the Charlotte Graded School. He was hired within one year of his arrival by the 4 C’s to design many of Dilworth’s early houses, making Hook the first professional architect to live in Charlotte. Over the course of his forty-five-year career, Hook designed some 800 to 1,000 homes and buildings across the Carolinas, including Charlotte’s U.S. Post Office and Courthouse, City Hall, Carolina Theater, three local fire stations, and several buildings on college campuses across North Carolina (including the Chapel Hill and Greensboro campuses of the University of North Carolina, Davidson College, and N.C. State, Duke, and Queens Universities). Hook also designed the J. B. Duke mansion, the William Henry Belk mansion, the west wing of the state capital in Raleigh, and the State Hospital in Morganton.
From 1905 to 1912, the Lucian H. Walker House was owned by Mrs. N. H. Bispham, a widow who later sold the house to George McNeill Rose, Jr. (1876-1952) and May Crow Rose (1876-1960). The house remained in the Rose family until 1965. A longtime cotton broker, George served for twenty-eight years as the secretary-treasurer of the Presbyterian General Assembly and the Presbyterian Foundation. The house subsequently passed through a number of owners as Dilworth re-emerged as a vibrant, revitalized neighborhood and Historic District.