520 East Franklin Street

Text

ROBERSON COTTAGE
c. 1940, c. 2008
This small, front-gabled, Craftsman-style cottage is two bays wide and triple-pile with a gabled wing projecting from the right (west) elevation. The house has wood shingles, eight-over-eight wood-sash windows, including a later, full-sized six-over-six window in the front gable, and an interior brick chimney. The six-panel door is sheltered by a two-bay-wide, hip-roofed porch supported by grouped square posts. An entrance on the left (east) elevation is sheltered by a shcd roof on molded brackets. On the right elevation of the front-gabled section, a one-story, shed-roofed addition has a projecting garden window on its right elevation. Behind the shed-roofed addition is a side-gabled wing that is two bays wide and single-pile with windows matching the main house. A later gabled ell at the rear of this wing has a slightly higher ridge. Among the smallest houses on East Franklin Street, the house may have been constructed as a guesthouse for the house at 516 East Franklin. A plaque on the house dates the Roberson Cottage to c. 1920, though it does not appear on Sanborn maps until 1945. The house was remodeled with the screening removed from the front porch and the garden window added about 2008.

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.