516 East Franklin Street
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W. S. ROBERSON HOUSE
c. 1910, c. 1920, c. 2000
This two-story, clipped-side-gabled house has Colonial Revival- and Craftsman-style features. The house is three bays wide and single-pile with a two-story, projecting, clipped-front-gabled wing centered on the façade. The house has plain weatherboards on the first floor, wood shingles on the second floor, a wood-shingled roof, and an interior brick chimney. It has twelve-over-one wood-sash windows with nine-over-one windows on the projecting front-gabled wing. On the right (west) end of the façade is a one-light-over-two-panel door and there is a pair of ten-light French doors on the left end of the façade, both of which are sheltered by a one-story, shed-roofed porch that extends the full-width of the façade, wrapping around the projecting bay. The porch has a standing-seam metal roof and is supported by grouped columns. A one-story, hip-roofed bay projects from the right elevation. There is a two-story, hip-roofed wing at the left rear (southeast) that was added between 1915 and 1925. A second-floor porch on the rear wing was enclosed after 1949. A two-story, clipped-gabled wing at the right rear (southwest) was added since 1992. A one-story, gabled hyphen connects from the right elevation of this wing to a one-and-a-half-story, clipped-front-gabled garage wing with details and materials matching those of the house. The garage has grouped nine-over-one windows, a shed-roofed dormer on the right elevation over the three garage doors, and a hip-roofed pent roof that extends around the perimeter of the garage. County tax records date the building to 1910 and it is present on the 1915 Sanborn map, the earliest map to record this part of Franklin Street. In 1928, it was occupied by W. S. Roberson [Bryant].
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.
