Blythe House
(ca. 1911)
The Blythe House was the boyhood home of celebrated writer and novelist William LeGette Blythe.
121 Gilead Road, Huntersville, NC 28078
The Blythe House served as the family homestead of the William Brevard (W. B.) and Hattye Bradley Jackson Blythe family for sixty years. An entrepreneur, W. B. Blythe (1872-1942) worked at the nearby Ranson Store, a general mercantile firm that sold everything from hats to coffins. He also worked as a registrar and judge of elections for the town of Huntersville. An active civic leader, Hattye Blythe (1872-1929) was appointed in 1913 as the first woman to serve on the Mecklenburg County School Board. She was elected in 1917 as the founding president of the Huntersville Civic Club. Hattye also designed the family’s Gilead Road home and shortly after moving in, organized and led north Mecklenburg County’s first Boy Scout troop which started meeting in the family’s home around 1912.
Property Quick Links
The busy couple also raised four children in the house: William LeGette (1900-1993), Charles Edgar (1904-1963), Frances Lee (1907-1971), and Rachel Jackson (1911-1981). Their eldest son LeGette was a prolific novelist and esteemed journalist. Among such other influential North Carolina authors as Thomas Wolfe, O. Henry, George Moses Horton, and Paul Greene, LeGette Blythe was part of a group of illustrious writers who inspired the Southern literary renaissance of the early 20th century. His impressive body of work – which includes Hornet’s Nest, a coauthored history of Mecklenburg County that remains a standard among regional historical narratives – earned him induction into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2002. A longtime writer for the Charlotte Observer, LeGette transitioned full time to writing novels, biographies, and dramas, ultimately producing over 30 novels. He was a two-time winner of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association’s Mayflower Award for the best nonfiction by a North Carolinian, making him one of only nine authors to receive that award multiple times. His continued local significance is aptly represented by his status as the namesake of Huntersville’s Legette Blythe Elementary School. The Blythe House retained personal significance for Legette Blythe throughout his life, both as his childhood home and as the central location for ongoing family gatherings, even after Legette started his own family in a house (since demolished) on the same block of Gilead Road as the Blythe House. The Blythe House is the last known extant structure to factor so prominently in his life.
In 1936, Frances Blythe and her husband Charles Dudley became primary owners of the Blythe House. She oversaw a mid-1950s redesign of the home, which was originally constructed in a transitional Queen Anne-Colonial Revival style with a wraparound first level porch. Despite the removal of the porch, the house maintains its impressive massing, volume, form, and stature, exhibiting a full-height entry porch and iconic facade that has served as a memorable landmark introducing Huntersville’s downtown corridor for decades. From the 1950s to the 1960s, all four grown Blythe siblings lived within a block of each other. In 1971, the Blythe Home was gifted to the North Carolina Boys Home, who used the building for their administrative offices. The house has since been used as commercial office space.