The Horace Williams House evolved over several architectural periods.
The dining room was the original temporary house built which construction was taking place on the main Octagon house. The room retains its original pine floor
boards, mantel, and window surrounds.
The parlor and entrance hall were built in the late 1880s,
the latter from what may have been a covered dog trot which was enclosed.
The parquet ceilings in both rooms are particularly noteworthy, probably crafted by African-American craftsmen from Chapel Hill.
The Octagon Room was built between in 1855 by Orange County architect John Berry and his laborer of most slave and Free Black craftsmen.
It was commissioned by Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick, a chemistry professor, who was "denounced from nearly every pulpit in the state" and dismissed by the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees for his outspoken opposition support of Free Soil candidate John C. Freemont in the 1856 presidential election.
Horace Williams, a professor of philosophy (depicted here in the oil painting by Mary Rees Graves), was tremendously popular among his students. According to Thomas Wolfe in You Can't Go Home Again, "He was a great teacher, and what he did for us, and for others before us for fifty years, was not to give us his 'philosophy' . . . but to communicate to us his alertness, his originality, his power to think." Students met with him many nights in the front parlor.
On the death of Horace Williams, the University of North Carolina became the sole owner of the house named for him. Restored in 1974, the house is maintained by the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill as a cultural resource and art exhibition space.
Click here to see more photos of Horace Williams and his house and grounds.
|
Horace Williams House 