Violet W. Currie House
(ca. 1890s)
The longtime boarding house remains as North Main Street’s sole extant 19th-century I-house.
525 N Main St, Davidson, NC 28036
The only intact 19th-century I-house on North Main Street is the former home of Violet Womack Currie (1852-1926) and her four sons: Archibald, Edward, James Wharley, and Thomas. Consistent with a relatively common nineteenth century practice when a family had a college-aged son, the recently widowed Violet moved her family in 1894 from Burlington, North Carolina, to Davidson where Archibald was enrolled in Davidson College. Her late husband James L. Currie was a Presbyterian minister who graduated from Hampden-Sydney College in 1869. James served as pastor at New Hope Presbyterian Church in Orange County from 1887 to 1889. From 1889 until 1894, he served as pastor for the Burlington First Presbyterian Church, founded by his father Archibald Currie in 1857.
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Violet, a native of Prince Edward County, Virginia, soon became the matron at the Student’s House, a boarding house established by then Davidson College president John B. Shearer for students who could not afford one of the town’s commercial boarding houses. Boarding houses were a Davidson College institution. Until the mid-twentieth century, the college did not offer meals on campus, leading to the rise of boarding house throughout the town to accommodate that need. Most boarding houses were run by women who operated out of their homes, feeding students three times a day. The many large frame nineteenth and twentieth century houses bordering the college campus evidence that common practice. Because career options for a widow with children in the 1890s were generally limited, running a boarding house in Davidson offered Violet Currie a very respectable form of employment.
It is unclear whether the current two-story frame house at 525 North Main Street was extant when Violet purchased the property in 1897 from Emma B. and J. S. Lafferty. Local historians have surmised that Violet constructed the house soon after purchasing the property, but the purchase prices paid for the property by the Laffertys ($1,400 in 1887) and Violet ($650) suggest a house may have already existed on the property. Violet lived in the house until her death in 1926. In the meantime, all four of her sons graduated from Davidson College. Archibald graduated in 1897. After graduate studies at Columbia, Cornell and the University of Virginia, he returned to accept a faculty position at Davidson College where he taught classics and mathematics, and ultimately received the Woodrow Wilson Chair of Economics and Political Science. Following his marriage to Lucy Martin, daughter of Davidson chemistry professor, Archibald and Lucy built a house at 559 North Main Street, four doors up from Violet. Edward graduated in 1901 and became a medical doctor. James Wharley graduated in 1904 and became a lawyer in Raeford, North Carolina. Thomas graduated in 1905 and became a minister in Virginia.
The Currie family sold the house in 1933 to A. B. Kuhn, who managed the Carolina Asbestos Company factory located along Depot Street. The house has changed hands several times since then, all the while retaining the classic I-house form, one of the two vernacular house types that dominated the built environment of rural Mecklenburg County from the colonial era until the early twentieth century. The house’s Doric columns and pediments on the side gables echo the Greek Revival elements found on such Davidson College campus landmarks as the nearby Eumenean and Philanthropic halls.