Phillips House and Morris Barn
(ca. 1925)
The Phillips House and Morris Barn, the home of longtime Matthews postmaster Pete Phillips, is a unique early twentieth century in-town farmhouse and agricultural operation.
131 W Charles St, Matthews, NC 28105
The Phillips House was built in 1925 for Oscar Luther “Pete” Phillips, his wife Beulah Paxton Phillips, and their two daughters Margaret and Mary Louise, in the heart of Matthews. The Craftsman-style bungalow was constructed on the former site of the Morris House, a three-room house that was moved to the southeast corner of the one-acre property to house servants and farm hands. The Morris House was later demolished around 1965. However. the Morris’ gabled barn was left in place to serve as a barn and cotton house for the Phillips family. The Phillips House was built by Beulah’s brother Tom Paxton, assisted by Bill Freeman who also built the nearby Pleasant Plains Baptist Church.
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Raised on his family’s nearby cotton farm, Pete Phillips (1882-1965) continued to work on the family farm and to manage tenants who sharecropped the family’s land even after going to work as a clerk for cotton merchant Thomas Jefferson Renfroe. He married Beulah in 1913 and they lived in a house on Trade Street before the Charles Street house was built. Appointed as the Matthews postmaster by the Roosevelt administration in 1933, Pete served in that capacity until 1953. During his tenure, a new federally funded post office was completed in 1939 at the corner of Trade Street and West Charles Street on land donated by local businessman Lester Hunt Yandle. The convenient location backed up to the Phillips House property. Pete also served on the Matthews Town Board and the Mecklenburg County School Board and was instrumental in the town’s efforts to bring both public electricity and new businesses to Matthews.
Beulah (1888-1978) worked as a homemaker and shared her house with her daughters until she died in 1978. Both daughters attended college. Margaret (1914-2016) worked as a teacher in the Mecklenburg County (and later, the unified) school system, spending the final nineteen years of her career as a school administrator. Mary Louise (1917-2013) studied library science, and in 1955 she became the director of the Mecklenburg County Library’s Carolina Room, an archive and reference center for local history. During her thirty-year tenure in that role, Mary Louise was critical in the development and long lasting success of that institution. The sisters themselves became “town institutions,” living in their childhood home in the center of town and remaining physically and socially active into their late nineties.
Although in town, the Phillips House did not have access to public water, sewer, or electrical power, until the mid-twentieth century. Farming was actively pursued within the town limits. Until the end of World War II, the Phillips family kept a milk cow in the barn and used the back third of the property as a pasture at various times for the cow, sheep, and a horse. The Phillips also kept chickens. An alley bordering the property on the east (now Library Lane) served a grist mill, a blacksmith shop, and a large livery stable. The Morris Barn is itself extremely significant as the only identified extant “in-town” barn in Mecklenburg County.