Benjamin DeWitt Funderburk House
(ca. 1904)
The stately home of local entrepreneur B. D. Funderburk remained in the Funderburk family for nearly 100 years.
201 W Charles St, Matthews, NC 28105
The grand scale and fashionable style of the Benjamin DeWitt Funderburk House evidence the rise to local prominence that Funderburk and the farming community of Matthews enjoyed thanks to the 1872 completion of the Carolina Central Railroad that connected the inland rail center of Charlotte to Wilmington’s coastal location. A depot established in the community two years later helped facilitate the commercial prosperity and growth that prompted the incorporation of Matthews as a town in 1879. It also benefitted entrepreneurs like Funderburk, who soon profited as both a dry goods merchant and banker. By the turn of the twentieth century, Matthews was a thriving agricultural service center with over 200 residents in a town that included a bank, several livery stables, a post office, drugstore, hotel, dry goods stores, grist mills, blacksmith shops, and cotton gins.
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Benjamin DeWitt (B.D.) Funderburk (1868 -1954) was born in Chesterfield County, South Carolina, to Ellison James (E.J.) and Selia Anne Funderburk. Shortly after B.D.’s birth, the family (which included ten children) moved to eastern Mecklenburg County. E.J., a farmer and entrepreneur, quickly became a large landowner. In 1878, he began acquiring parcels in the small railroad settlement of Matthews, where he and his sons B.D., Thomas, and Ellison soon became civic leaders and prominent businessmen. As the most prominent of the siblings, B.D. expanded his father’s dry goods store on North Trade Street and in 1909 constructed another building for the Bank of Matthews, for which he served as president. B.D. was also a member of the Mecklenburg County Board of Education for over thirty years. Brothers Thomas and Ellison owned general merchandise stores, a blacksmith shop, and a grist mill.
B.D. married Sallie Faulkner in 1895 and raised three children, each actively involved in the family’s business enterprises. Shortly after their wedding, B.D. acquired a one-story dwelling on the present West Charles Street lot from his father. B.D. constructed the existing two-story Queen Anne-Colonial Revival residence on the site in 1904, incorporating structural elements of the original house. Their son Lee Edward Funderburk acquired the house in 1926, the same year he married Mildred Elizabeth (Betty) Morrah. A graduate of Erskine College, Lee served as president of the Bank of Matthews for fifty-six years. Betty taught in the public schools. Lee and Betty had no children but boarded school teachers in their spacious house. Betty lived in the home until 1991, when her niece Nancy and husband David Stafford purchased the house. Subsequent owners renovated the Funderburk House in 2009.
In addition to the picturesque Funderburk House, the property includes three circa 1904 outbuildings: a brick pump house that originally used a windmill to generate power for the pump; a carriage house that was remodeled circa 1920 into a two-bay garage; and a meat house with a decorative Eastlake door.