620 East Franklin Street
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HOWE-FITCH HOUSE
c. 1905, c. 2007
Impressively sited on a large lot at the southwest corner of East Franklin and Park Place Lane, the Howe-Fitch House is a two-story, hip-roofed, Colonial Revival-style house. It is five bays wide and double-pile with a large gabled dormer with exposed purlins centered on the façade and projecting one- and two-story hip-roofed bays on the left (east) and right (west) elevations. The house has plain weatherboards, replacement twenty-over-one Victorian-sash windows on the façade, one-over-one windows throughout the rest of the house, an interior brick chimney, and a slate roof with sawn rafter tails. The entrance, centered on the façade in a slightly projecting two-story bay, is a paneled door with two-light-over-one-panel sidelights. It is sheltered by a full-width, hip-roofed porch with a standing-seam metal roof supported by square columns. An original one-story, hip-roofed rear ell extends from the right rear (southwest) corner of the house.
A two-story-with-raised-basement, hip-roofed wing at the left rear (southeast) was constructed about 2007, taking advantage of the fact that the site slopes down to the rear. It has grouped one-over-one windows on the upper floors and an eight-light French door and two fixed eight-light windows at the basement level of the east elevation. This wing connects to a two-story, hip-roofed garage that is set one level below the main house. The three-bay garage has twenty-over-one windows and a faux slate roof. The center bay on the east elevation projects slightly and there is a hip-roofed wing extending from the southwest corner of the garage. While the addition nearly doubles the size of the house, it is sited to the rear and does not negatively affect the historic integrity of the house. The site has been heavily landscaped with a modified stone wall with iron gates at the front, brick walkways, and a brick circular driveway on the east side of the house, accessed by Park Place Lane.
The land on which this house stands was purchased from the university by George Howe in 1905, and the house, designed by Joseph Pratt, was apparently built shortly thereafter. Howe came to UNC to teach classics, but only lived in the house until 1912. It had several owners before being purchased in 1944 by R. B. and Katherine Fitch, owners of Fitch Lumber Company.
In the 2015 survey, this was deemed a Contributing Building.
SOURCE: Heather Wagner Slane, National Register of Historic Places Nomination: Chapel Hill Historic District Boundary Increase and Additional Documentation, Orange County, OR1750 (Raleigh, NC: North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office, 2015), courtesy of the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office.
