Under Review: National Register Historic District proposals made for Sunnyside, Centerville neighborhoods

By Mary Giunca
JOURNAL REPORTER

The Sunnyside neighborhood often gets ignored in favor of its more famous neighbor to the west.

“We exist and we’re tiny,” said Natasha Gore, who has lived in Sunnyside since 2004. “I think Winston-Salem’s perception of Sunnyside is that it’s really insignificant. We’re adjacent to Washington Park and we get eaten up by the hoopla of Washington Park.”

But with its smaller, more eclectic atmosphere, the neighborhood has a lot to offer, Gore said.

She said she hopes that having the area gain recognition as a National Register Historic District will help people distinguish Sunnyside as a neighborhood with its own distinct history. The Centerville neighborhood, which is north of Sunnyside, is also under review as a historic district.

The state’s National Register Advisory Committee will review the nominations for both districts Feb. 14. From there, the nominations will go to the National Park Service, where they are expected to be approved later this year.

The Sunnyside neighborhood is not as easy to pin down with a handy label as some neighborhoods are, Gore said. People who are working class live there as well as professors at the N.C. School of the Arts.

There are large houses, as well as small ones.

That diversity was part of the neighborhood from the start, said Sherry Joines Wyatt, a historic-preservation consultant who conducted the research for the National Register nomination.

Sunnyside was laid out in the 1890s, and its mixture of industrial and suburban development and streetcar route makes it unusual among the city’s neighborhoods, she said.

Central Terrace, which is to the west of Sunnyside, was laid out in 1912, Wyatt said. The neighborhood has some of the best preserved bungalows in the city.

H.E. Fries was the impetus behind much of Sunnyside’s and Central Terrace’s development, Wyatt said. He was an early industrialist who built the Southside Cotton Mill, which was near the site of the Carter G. Woodson School of Challenges charter school. He was also an investor in the streetcar, which ran through the neighborhood.

“It was fashionable to live in this burgeoning area,” Wyatt said. “That was a word that was used over and over.”

Workers lived in small houses near the mill. Along Sprague Street, where the streetcar line ran, the houses were larger.

One of the most impressive houses was Hillcrest, which still stands in the 400 block of Sprague Street and is built in the Queen Anne style.

The smaller neighborhood of Centerville lives on mostly in historical records.

“Nobody much remembers its name, bless its little heart,” Wyatt said. “It was settled fairly early on.”

Old maps indicate that Centerville was settled by 1876 and that it was halfway between Waughtown and Salem, which is how it got its name.

Centerville was mostly a workers neighborhood and the people who lived there worked at such places as Forsyth Manufacturing, a furniture company, or the Southside Mills. Today the historic district is about 11 blocks and is near NCSA.

Even in its heyday, many of the homes were rental properties, which has made if difficult to glean much information.

“It’s really sad in Centerville,” Wyatt said. “I couldn’t find a single person who was in the neighborhood who had been there a long, long time.”

The two historic districts thrived throughout the early part of the 20th century, Wyatt said.

The industry in the area was viewed as a sign of progress and pride, she said. The South appeared to finally be rebounding from the Civil War and creating the industry that it had lacked in the antebellum period.

But the boom didn’t last.

People started moving to the suburbs in the 1950s and ’60s. Hillcrest, one of Sunnyside’s most impressive houses, had been split up into apartments by 1945.

“These areas just got left behind,” Wyatt said.

Bill Lancaster, who has lived in a house at the corner of Brookline and Stockton streets for 68 years, said that the neighborhood was a nice place to grow up.

He remembered playing in Fogle Creek, which was known as Blue Dye Branch, for the dyes dumped there by Arista Mills, which had been earlier known as the Southside Mill.

“We played in that creek all the time as little kids,” he said. “We didn’t know any better.”

On Saturday mornings, local farmers came through selling hams and vegetables from carts, he said.

“As far as I know, everyone was satisfied with living around here,” he said. “They weren’t always looking for somewhere else to move.

“We didn’t feel better than anybody else, I’ll tell you that. A lot of us were poor as church mice, but the people were always nice.”

Lancaster said that when the old families he grew up with started dying out, their children left the old neighborhood. The building of a highway split the neighborhood and the old Arista Mills was torn down. Landlords who do not keep up their property have been a problem for the neighborhood.

Having the neighborhood receive historic district status might encourage a trend he’s seen in recent years of people moving in, buying up the older homes and renovating them.

“It would be one thing to draw the people here,” he said. “There’s not going to be any industry coming this way to make the people want to come. But people are fixing up the houses and that’s a good thing.”