John C. Wilson House
(ca. 1886)
The Victorian styled John C. Wilson House was once the farmstead of a small but successful late nineteenth century family commercial agricultural operation.
11930 Bain School Road, Mint Hill, NC, 28227
The John Calvin Wilson House is the remnant of a once typical, but fast-disappearing post-Civil War Mecklenburg County farmstead where corn, cotton, and other small grains were once cultivated. Built in 1886 by Wilson and his mother as a one-story structure, the house had only two rooms. Consistent with a late nineteenth century North Carolina architectural trend, the house was remodeled gradually into a larger vernacular Victorian house with six additional rooms and picturesque decorative elements. The second floor was added in 1907. The house once sat on a 298 acre farm that contained tenant houses, a log central-passage barn, and a log corn crib.
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Wilson, like many postbellum southern farmers, primarily raised cash crops, namely cotton and tobacco. Known as "Smoking John" to his neighbors – distinguishing him from the two other John Wilsons who lived in the area based on his characteristic corncob pipe – Wilson worked his farm for most of his adult life. He employed five African American tenant farmers who lived on his farm. According to Wilson’s account books, those men received housing, food, and a small salary in return for their labor. Until the 1930s, Mint Hill farmers like Wilson had to haul their cotton to Matthews by mule and wagon to have it ginned. Wilson also ran a sawmill on his property, one of three in the area. Much of the lumber produced by those sawmills was sold in Charlotte.
Wilson’s son Lawrence later took charge of the farm operations, raising cotton, corn, and livestock with the assistance of tenant farmers. Both Lawrence and his father strived to be as self-sufficient as possible, even though both were actively engaged in commercial agriculture. Both grew summer gardens, raised livestock for food, and maintained small orchards. Lawrence shifted his agricultural emphasis from crops to dairy farming in the 1940s. He operated a dairy on his share of the land through the 1960s.
Meanwhile, during the early 1940s, John Wilson rented the house to Earnest and Irene Phillips, who purchased the house and eleven acres in 1944. They raised six daughters and one son in the farmhouse. Earnest worked for Cole Manufacturing Company in Charlotte for thirty years while maintaining a summer garden and raising chickens, cows, and hogs. Irene was a homemaker, but also made and sold butter on the side. Three generations of the Philips family have owned the property. During that period, as small-scale cultivation of cash crops declined, the John Calvin Wilson House followed a pattern of transition of several surviving nineteenth century Mecklenburg County farmhouses as its function has changed from actual farmhouse to a rural non-farm residence, and its inhabitants migrated from self-sufficient farmers to primarily non-agricultural wage laborers. Despite those changes, the John Calvin Wilson House has remained remarkably intact in its Victorian form – notable for its exterior cross-gable ells, decorative wooden siding, and window and porch appointments – while also retaining much of its original interior wooden walls, moldings, and vernacular picturesque mantels.