The Person Place Preservation Society’s biennial homes tour, scheduled for Saturday, April 27, will feature a number of historic houses situated along the old post road that ran between Fayetteville and Richmond—a route that in the early nineteenth century provided Louisburg and Warrenton with regular north-south mail service and coach traffic. Several of these structures are identified on a detailed plan of the road produced in 1822 by Hamilton Fulton (d. 1834), North Carolina’s state engineer.

A civil engineer of Scottish descent, Fulton came to North Carolina from Great Britain in 1819 at the request of state officials who sought his help in improving transportation facilities. The state’s economy had suffered for years because shifting coastal inlets, shallow sounds and rivers, and poor roads made commerce and travel difficult. Through the vision and leadership of Archibald DeBow Murphey (1777?-1832), a state senator from Hillsborough between 1812 and 1818, state legislators and private investors gradually made efforts of varying success to foster internal improvements. These included the construction of canals, improvements to rivers, and development of roads and turnpikes.

In 1822, Fulton and his assistant, Robert H. B. Brazier, undertook a survey of the post road between Fayetteville and the Virginia line, seeking ways to straighten and improve the route. As he reported to the Board of Public Improvements that year, “this Road being the greatest thoroughfare from South to North, in the State of North-Carolina, and being the route of the Southern and Northern Mail Stages, it will be very important that any improvements which may take place on the road should intersect the whole of the towns through which the present road passes; and although these towns do not lie in the direct line, yet the deviations are so trivial that little sacrifice of distance will be made in embracing them, provided a direct communication is effected between each.”

Fulton and Brazier calculated that the road, which meandered approximately 132 miles between Fayetteville and the Virginia line, could be shortened by eighteen miles by utilizing a “straight course.” The entirety of the road between Louisburg and Warrenton, for example, ran west of a straight line between the two county seats. The engineers believed that two miles could be saved by straightening this stretch. Fulton recommended that the road should be forty feet wide between ditches and explained how “winter road” construction should be undertaken.

The plan drawn by Brazier, preserved in the State Archives of North Carolina, shows bridges, ferries (including Robinson’s Ferry in Warren County), mills, schools, taverns, and other features. Also shown are the locations of private residences. In some cases, the names of the owners are included. Several of these structures will be open during the upcoming Person Place homes tour. Among them are Monreath, labeled on the map as the residence of James Maxwell; the Wilson house, on the site of a plantation owned by Stephen Outterbridge; and the home of Lark Fox, now known as the Timberlake house. A collection of five structures just outside the northern boundary of the town of Louisburg appear to be located at the present site of the Person Place. One structure shown on what is now Main Street in Louisburg in all probability is the Shine-King House.

The website of the Person Place Preservation Society (www.personplace.org) contains more information about the tour. Tickets are available at The Franklin Times and the Coffee Hound Bookshop in Louisburg, as well as the Cotton Company in Wake Forest.

Published in The Franklin Times on April 10, 2019.

Maury York is director of the Tar River Center for History and Culture at Louisburg College. The author wishes to acknowledge use of biographical sketches of Hamilton Fulton and Archibald DeBow Murphey found in The Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, edited by William S. Powell (University of North Carolina Press, 1979-1996). Fulton’s full account of his work on the road survey can be found in Annual Report of the Board of Public Improvements of North-Carolina, to the General Assembly, December 10, 1822; Together with Mr. Fulton’s Reports to the Board on the Public Works Projected and Carrying on Throughout the State During the Present Year (Raleigh: Printed by J. Gales & Son, 1822), copy in the North Carolina Collection, J. Y. Joyner Library, ECU.