Living with antiques: Middleton House in Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1997 by Wendell D. Garrett, Elisabeth D. Garrett

For an eighteenth-century man of wealth, his house, furniture, and paintings presented a spectacular means of exhibiting his good taste. Middleton House and the art collection of its current owners, R. Philip Hanes Jr. and his wife, Charlotte, reflect the best Georgian rules of taste. His maternal grandmother, Martha Thurmond Chatham, and her sisters bought the house on the site in Clarks Hill in McCormick County, South Carolina, where it was built between 1825 and 1829 and moved it to its current location in 1930.

The beauty of rural architecture in North and South Carolina is subtle and at first unprepossessing. It is seldom magnificent, sometimes untidy, and often vernacular and utilitarian. Today, country roads wind through small farms and scattered plantations, but in the 1780s the German visitor Johann D. Schoepf observed:

The country...must be imagined as a continuous, measureless forest, an ocean of trees, in which only here and there cultivated spots, what are called plantations, of more or less extent are to be seen. In the midst of the fields stands commonly a house, better or worse; the kitchen and other mean out-buildings are at a great distance.(*)

Middleton House, built late in the Federal period, maintains the careful modulation of spaces characteristic of the eighteenth century. There is the ordered procession of austere classical details from base to roof line on the exterior and from floor to ceiling in each room. As plantation culture developed, owners built and furnished their houses with a fashion-conscious blend of regional and urban elements. The Palladian ideal provided a basic framework that could accommodate new stylistic devices.

The Middleton family emigrated from England in the seventeenth century and settled in Maryland. Major Hugh Tear Middleton (d. 1803), a participant in the Indian wars and the American Revolution, assembled about two hundred thousand acres of land in South Carolina. His son John Middleton (c. 1762-1846), the builder of the house, married Elizabeth Scott (1785/86-1857), whose family owned Scotts Ferry on the Savannah River, which forms the Georgia-South Carolina borden By family tradition the house was completed about the time their ninth, and last, child, Robert Henry Middleton (1829-1896), was born. He inherited the house and his widow, Margaret Eugenia Calhoun Middleton, continued to live in it until her death in 1928. By that time the family had fallen on hard times and advertised the sale of various salvageable architectural features before demolition. The advertisement caught the eye of the Thurmond sisters from Mississippi, all three of whom had moved to North Carolina and all three of whom were in the antiques business. Two had married Chatham brothers of the Chatham textile manufactory in Elkin, North Carolina. The sisters not only bought bits and pieces of the house (which have since been reinstalled), but the house itself, for which they paid one dollar. They had it dismantled and the parts shipped by rail to Winston-Salem, where they were reassembled under the direction of William Roy Wallace, a local architect.

The parents of R. Philip Hanes Jr., Ralph Philip Hanes and Dewitt Chatham Hanes, were both philanthropists deeply committed to historic preservation. In 1940 Ralph Hanes worked on the planning and organization of Old Salem, the restoration of a Moravian colony founded in 1766, and Dewitt Hanes was instrumental in the preservation and restoration of Stratford Hall (1729-1730), the birthplace of Robert E. Lee in Stratford, Virginia.

In keeping with the philanthropic nature of generations of the family, Philip and Charlotte Hanes in 1991 donated Middleton House and some of the land to nearby Wake Forest University, retaining life tenancy. It is the Haneses' earnest hope that their art collection will remain in Winston-Salem and Middleton House will become a house-museum.

The authors would like to acknowledge the valuable help they received from Allen H. Patterson Jr., Middleton House: A Story of Restoration and Preservation (Wake Forest University, Oral History Project, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 1995).

* Travels in the Confederation [1783-1784] (Philadelphia, 1911), vol. 2, p. 103.

WENDELL D. GARRETT is editor at large for The Magazine ANTIQUES.

ELISABETH D. GARRETT is an author and educator in American decorative arts.